The Online Geocacher
Your Free User-Created Ezine for All Things Geocaching

Mon, Apr 14, 2008

Alabama The Beautiful

That says it all!

Geocaching Alabama is an excellent way to learn the history, meet the people and see the places and things that make Alabama special.

Geocaching will lead you from the revered burial grounds of our earliest inhabitants, the Mississippi Indians at Moundville Archaeological Park near Tuscaloosa, to the high-tech research and development home of some of the world's top space exploration scientists at Huntsville's NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

Geocaches can be found from Alabama's beautiful white sand beaches at famous Gulf Shores to the stunning views from our highest State Park on Cheaha Mountain.

While geocaching in Alabama I have discovered many interesting places and things around our great state that I never knew about, even after living in it for 50+ years!

One of the first geocaches I found introduced me to a small historical park that is less than ten miles from the Homewood neighborhood I grew up in, a park that I had never known was there!

A search of geocaching.com for caches in my area revealed one named 'Pig Iron' in an area I knew well (or thought I did at the time!). The streets in this neighborhood are named after Civil War battlefields... fabled names like Shilow, Appomattox and Decatur.

Though I had passed through them a thousand times it never occured to me to ask why these streets were so named.

Pig Iron... Cool! Being many years removed from the elementary schools where such things are taught and not being particularly aware of the history of Alabama I knew little more than that Birmingham was built around the plentiful seams of iron ore and the requisite coal to fire furnaces, but this location is miles away from today's Birmigham steel industry, in the bedroom community of Mountain Brook. Pig iron is the intermediate product of smelting steel ore with coke and resin. Why would a cache be named Pig Iron if it's in Mountain Brook?

My GPS led me to familiar territory, the battlefield-named streets that I had so often traveled, and then to a narrow dirt path that turns off of one of these roads... a footpath which I had often passed but never noticed!

Following this path was interesting; it had been carved in part out of a stone hillside and was nicely maintained, with a hand-hewn wood railing along one side. Obviously someone has spent some money keeping this path up. Also obvious was the fact that it had been there for a very long time.

After a quarter mile the path opens into a beautiful little park with a creek running through it, and on the hillside sit the remains of an old stone furnace. Neat! A new and interesting place!

A sign informs me that "The Cahaba Iron Works is the most historically significant place in Mountain Brook. It is perhaps better known as the Irondale or McElwain Furnace and is familiar to residents of Shades Valley by the name "the Old Cannon Ball Factory" although no cannon balls were ever produced here. This furnace went into production in 1864 under furnace master Wallace S. McElwain."

Now that's interesting. My kids had gone to McElwain School. As with the street names, I had never questioned where the school's name came from.

I found the cache hidden a short distance from the preserved ruins of the foundry and returned home curious about this place.

A bit of online research told me that in 1862 things were not going well for the Confederacy in Mississippi, and Holly Springs Mississippi foundry owner McElwain knew that it was only a matter of time before Union troops reached his part of the state. Since his foundry produced arms for the Confederacy it would surely be one of the major targets for destruction.

McElwain began making plans to move his foundry operation to a safer locale. He had read that central Alabama had lands which were rich with deposits of coal and iron ore with a good supply of hardwood for making charcoal within easy reach of limestone - all prerequisites for making pig iron. On February 22, 1863, McElwain purchased his first piece of land in Jefferson County and began to move his foundry.

McElwain chose to build his furnace tucked away in a remote area of Jefferson County where he believed it would be safe from detection and destruction in the event northern troops invaded the valley. However, when Wilson's Raiders eventually passed through Jefferson County in 1865, someone (probably scouts who came in advance of the troops with the express purpose of finding the furnaces) had done excellent ground work, because the location was known and Wilson dispatched his troops on a sweeping raid through the area in April 1865. All of the blast furnaces in the county were destroyed, including McElwain's. The wooden structures of these furnaces were burned and everything that could be broken down was destroyed.

There is nothing left to indicate that a battle ever took place at the McElwain Furnace. Most of the workers, with the exception of McElwain and his partner Merrill, were slaves who undoubtedly welcomed Wilson's Company of US soldiers as saviors. After the destruction however the slaves had nowhere to go, were now unemployed, and so stayed on to rebuild the furnace.

According to The Greenville Advocate, April 18 1867 "the furnace had scarcely ceased its smouldering, after being burnt by the Federal army when McElwain, with perseverance that animates and kindles the spirit of progression" started making plans to get back in operation at the earliest possible moment.

McElwain would go on to help build the infrastructure that became Birmingham, the Steel Capitol of the World, firmly entrenching Alabama in the political and economic leadership of world events.

WOW! This reading brought Alabama history alive for me. I had arrived via GPS directions from my home 15 miles away in about a half-hour, in air-conditioned comfort! Think of the hardships these men faced. The idea of moving a foundry and fifty households on horseback and mule-cart, hacking out their own roads as they went, finding this little valley and building a huge stone furnace by hand, stone by stone, mining and transporting the raw materials and sending the pigs of iron by wagon 25 miles to the Brock's Gap railroad just stunned me. Then when it was torn down they built it again!

Who knew? Here is a wonderful place and story from Alabama's past, and it is but one small part of what geocaching throughout Alabama has since taught me about the state that is my home!