James Withers Sloss did not doubt he had picked the right location for his new iron smelting company's first blast furnace when construction was begun in the early 1880's.

All about lay easily accessible vast deposits of coal, limestone and iron ore-the three minerals essential to the smelting of iron. And the new furnace, situated about one mile east of the young city of Birmingham, Ala., was also conveniently near reliable transportation for its raw materials and finished products two railroads.

One of these was the Alabama Great Southern, control of which in 1895 was to pass to the one year old Southern Railway Company. To be operated since as the Southern Railway System's line from Chattanooga, Tenn., through Birmingham to Meridian, Miss., its years of service to the industry which James Withers Sloss founded would bear witness to the foresight of that Alabama businessman and railroader.

For it was while active in the affairs of the second of these railroads, the South & North Alabama, that Sloss first learned of the valuable mineral deposits of northern Alabama. These deposits were heaviest in the area where the tracks of the South & North Alabama were crossed by the tracks of the Alabama Great Southern, a crossover which had determined the very location of the city of Birmingham when it was chartered in 1871. So when Sloss expanded his business activities into the mining of coal and the smelting of iron, reason led him to build his furnace on a site so ideally situated that it is still, 79 years later, the location of two furnaces operated by the company which eventually come into control of the Sloss properties United States Piue and Foundry Company, "the world's largest manufacturer of cast iron pressure pipe."

It was on this site that the Sloss Furnace Company made its first run of iron from the first of its furnaces in 1882, and in 1883, a second furnace at the same site was "placed in blast" the industry's way of saying it went into operation.

Southern hopper cars lined up for slag loading at U. S. Pipe's newest blast furnace.

The pig iron which the Sloss Furnace Company produced found a ready market in the economy of a rapidly industrializing country. Manufacturers of pipe, machinery and hardware bought it up nearly as fast as the Sloss furnaces could produce it. And since there were still in America vast acres of land which were yet to be opened to the farmer's plow, manufacturers of agricultural implements too called on Sloss for pig iron, as did makers of wagon parts. The demands of this industrial and agricultural expansion were still running strong when in 1887 the 75-year-old Sloss sold his interest in his company to a group of Virginia' and Alabama industrialists. With new owners came a new name: Sloss Iron & Steel Company.

The next decade was one of continued expansion for Sloss. In 1889, the company completed and placed in blast a third furnace, in North Birmingham; it plunged into the last decade of the 19th century by acquiring the properties of the Sheffield Iron Company of Sheffield, Ala., which included blast furnaces at Sheffield and Florence, ore fields in Franklin County and coal properties in Walker County. Also acquired were bee-hive coke ovens (so called because of their shape) for deriving coke from coal.

The heads of manufacturing operations of U. S. Pipe & Foundry Company are President Robert E. Garrett, center, and vice-presidents Daniel E. Watkins, left, and Robert N. Voigt, right. On the building face behind them is a partial list of U. S. Pipe's products.

The industrial neighbors of the Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Company, as its name became in 1889, were also growing and changing.

In 1895, the Southern Railway Company had bought control of the Alabama Great Southern from its English operators. Formed a year earlier through reorganization of the Richmond & Danville Railroad and its parent Richmond & Danville Terminal Company, the Southern at that time had also acquired the properties of the Georgia Pacific Railway, which the R&D had operated. Thus it was that the Southern in the mid 1890's brought to industrial Birmingham a vast network of rail facilities over which its varied output might reach the market place.

Seen from the catwalk atop U. S. Pipe's newest blast furnace, a string of Southern hopper cars is shown being loaded with slag, one of the by-products which U. S. Pipe sells to industrial users.

A key link in this chain was the Georgia Pacific, the realization of a bold plan to connect Atlanta, Ga., by rail with the Mississippi River and its gateways to the West.

Constructed under three separate franchises held by the Richmond & Danville Terminal Company, the road was begun in the spring of 1882 and was opened as far as Birmingham in November of the next year. By 1887, the line had been built as far as Columbus, and in 1899 it reached the Mississippi River. During the same period of construction on the Georgia Pacific main line, branch lines were laid into the mineral rich hills and valleys of the Birmingham area.

Cast iron pressure pipe "flows" in a steady stream from U. S. Pipe's Birmingham, Bessemer and Chattanooga plants to industrial and utility consumers across the nation. Gondola cars, as here, and flatcars, too, are used in transporting the pipe.

Today's Southern System includes that part of the Georgia Pacific which extends from Atlanta through Birmingham to Columbus.

When a new president for Sloss-Sheffield had to be named in 1901, the company's leadership chose a man who had demonstrated outstanding energy and ability in his role as a man instrumental in the building of the Georgia Pacific.

This "quenching car," which runs on flanged wheels, is used at U. S. Pipe's coke and by-products plant. In the ovens in the background, coal is reduced to coke which is then loaded into the car by "pushers" passing through the ovens. It is then water-sprayed and dumped (foreground) onto the "dock."

He was J. C. Maben, during whose service to Sloss- Sheffield plans were made for the purchase of the Alabama Company.

Shortly after Maben retired in 1917, Sloss-Sheffield acquired Alabama's blast furnaces at Gadsden, iron ore mines in Jefferson and Etowah counties and coal properties in Jefferson and Tuscaloosa counties.

Another man who served as president of Sloss-Sheffield was also to become active in the business life of the Southern Railway System. Hugh Morrow became a director of the Southern Railway Company in 1938 and served until 1954 when he became a director of the Southern-controlled Alabama Great Southern Railroad Company.

When Hugh Morrow died in 1960 he left behind a business career that not only served to illustrate Southern's ties with Sloss-Sheffield, but also bridged the last corporate change in the industry begun in 1882 with one blast furnace. For several years Morrow was vice-chairman of the board of United States Pipe and Foundry Company, which had absorbed the Sloss-Sheffield properties in 1952.

Incorporated in 1899, U. S. Pipe was a consolidation of several cast iron pressure pipe companies which operated foundries in Alabama, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York State, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

One of these foundries, also a long time customer of the Southern and its predecessor lines was the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Foundry & Pipe Works. Its facilities today are devoted to the manufacture of fittings and special castings measuring up to 36 inches in diameter. The Chattanooga plant of U. S. Pipe was the first facility erected in the South for the manufacture of cast iron pressure pipe.

Gondolas are loaded with iron pigs cast a few minutes earlier from a stream of molten iron. The steam rising from the car is formed as water is sprayed over the hot pigs as they are loaded.

As long ago as 1832, the city of Nashville had used such pipe in its water system. In 1867, Nashville city officials commissioned David Giles, operator of a small local foundry, to manufacture pipe for local consumption. A decade later, 1877, Giles moved his plant to Chattanooga and erected there the facilities which U. S. Pipe acquired in 1899.

Before absorbing the Sloss-Sheffield properties in 1952, U. S. Pipe had already become established in the north Alabama foundry industry. One of the properties from which U. S. Pipe was formed in 1899 was the Howard-Harrison Foundry Company of Bessemer, Ala. It had been built in 1888 by a St. Louis pipe manufacturer. In 1911, U. S. Pipe had bought the properties of the Dimmick Pipe Company in North Birmingham.

With its 1952 merger with Sloss-Sheffield, U. S. Pipe brought all phases of cast iron pipe production together. From the mining of the minerals it uses as raw materials in the manufacture of pig iron to the casting of the pipe from this iron, complete control over the products on which its corporate reputation rests is carefully and watchfully exercised. One result of this is that nothing goes to waste. Indeed, so thorough is the use of each and every bit of ash and molecule of gas that one is reminded of the meat packer who markets everything but the squeal from a butchered hog.

Briefly, U. S. Pipe's principals types of products are cast iron pressure pipe and fittings with various types of joints appropriate to water, gas, sewer and industrial service; cast iron and steel heavy-wall, hollow cylindrical castings for widely diversified industrial applications; pig iron for its own use and for sale to various types of other foundries; coke for blast furnaces and foundries, its own and others, and for chemical plants and other industrial users; coal chemicals and some "chemical intermediates" for chemical and allied industries; blast furnace slag for concrete aggregate, expanded slag for lightweight aggregate and slag from which one of its own divisions makes mineral wool for insulation; and finally, ready-mix concrete for sale in the Birmingham area.

Southern's modern-day function as it relates to u. S. Pipe has not changed a great deal in character from that of the Alabama Great Southern's responsibility to the Sloss company 79 years ago. The railway's job is still one of bringing raw materials to U. S. Pipe and taking its finished product to market.

Volumes, however, have changed a, great deal. Just how much is indicated by the fact that dollar value of mineral production in the South during the years 1947-48 to 1958-59 alone increased 87 per cent; it is this mineral production which is the raw material from which u. S. Pipe derives its varied output, and it is the Southern which plays a prime role in bringing this raw material to U. S. Pipe.

Southern hauls much of U. S. Pipe's domestic ore from the area of Russellville, Ala. Southern also serves U. S. Pipe's North Birmingham limestone quarry. Sand, clay and cement, too, come to U. S. Pipe over Southern lines, as does some of its coal.

The various finished products and by-products which u. S. Pipe produces from these raw materials find their way to the industrial and private consumer in a multitude of forms; paints, textiles and hosiery , fertilizer, insecticides, building blocks, insulation, stoves, sanitary ware, automotive and machinery parts, and explosives.

U.S. Pipe makes cast iroll pressure pipe by casting it centrifugally in metal molds, a 12-inch diameter pipe 18 feet long is being cast.

But the bulk of U. S. Pipe's production is, of course, cast iron pipe. In a flow as inexorably steady as that of the molten iron which is the parent product, the gleaming black cylinders roll away from u. S. Pipe's Birmingham, Bessemer and Chattanooga plants and over Southern lines across the South through the gateways of Memphis, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati and Washington. Consigned to communities and industrial plants across the nation, the pipe provides this growing country with the underground roadways its immense water, gas and sewerage needs demand.

And James Withers Sloss' original product remains in great demand. But recently cast from a blindingly brilliant stream of molten iron, iron pigs sizzle and hiss beneath a spray of water and pass on, still far from cool, to be loaded in steam-shrouded gondolas for shipment across Southern lines to steel mills and iron foundries.

U.S. Pipe makes cast iroll pressure pipe by casting it centrifugally in metal molds, an 18-foot lellgth of 24-inch diameter pipe has just been centrifugally cast and removed from casting machine mold at left.

A major market for u. S. Pipe's pig iron is the 13-state area served by the Southern Railway System. It is an area in which construction and industrial growth draws so heavily on the steel industry that last year the South's steel plants operated at a higher rate than did those of the nation as a whole -in November and December, two to three per cent higher, a margin much more substantial in terms of tonnage than mere percentage figures indicate.

It is an area in which the population increase during the last decade was greater than the combined population of 14 states outside the South. An expanding population means new housing, and a population growth such as that of the South means whole new developments rising impressively from the rich land. This means water, gas and sewerage facilities, and this in turn means pipe.

It is an area that has seen many changes in the last 79 years, experienced much growth -as demonstrated by both the growth in size and cordial relationship of one of the South's leading industries, U. S. Pipe and Foundry Company, and of Southern Railway System that serves the South.