Today, the Alabama Classic Commemorative Silver Half Dollar Coin remembers part of Alabama’s history with iron ore and its first governor, William Wyatt Bibb.
Bibb left his US Senate position as a senator from Georgia on November 9, 1816 to become the territorial governor of Alabama.
After working for their statehood, the people of Alabama voted him to be their new state governor to which he was inaugurated on November 9, 1819, and their statehood became official on December 14, 1819.
In those days, Alabama experienced several “firsts” including blast furnaces and governors.
In The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama, published in 1910, Ethel Armes described those early “firsts.”
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It was up in the Chickasaw country in the northwestern region of Alabama Territory, county of Franklin, that the first blast furnace of Alabama was put up in the year 1818, and pig iron making on a commercial basis begun.
There had been, as has been mentioned, forge and smithy at Indian village, Spanish fort, Federal trading post, and territorial colony; but the frontier smith wrought out of imported blooms and bars for the most part, and little use was made of Alabama iron ore.
Concerning Old Cedar Creek, which was the name given this first blast furnace, all facts have, after much searching, become distinctly outlined.
That precise locality opened up to settlement by Jackson’s scout, Major Russell, was incorporated in part of the huge land grant of the Chickasaw Cession of 1818, out of which the county of Franklin was formed.
Shortly after the organization of this county, an iron maker, one Joseph Heslip, took up ground in Russells Valley, some three miles from Russellville, and established there the first iron works of Alabama.
According to the records in the land office at Montgomery, “Joseph Heslip bought the SE1/4— 10 — 7 — 12 from the Government, November 11th, 1818, at two dollars per acre.”
It is also recorded that Anthony Winston and John Hamilton bought land at the same time in this neighborhood.
As soon as his grant was recorded Heslip selected a furnace site on the horseshoe bend of Cedar Creek where the water had a sharp, quick flow, and, according to T. L. Fossick, he straightway bought materials and began construction work.
His plant, rapidly completed, comprised not only the rough stone jacket-clad furnace, but also a Catalan forge, a foundry, and a crude sort of rolling mill, together with warehouses and tenants’ shacks.
Cedar Creek furnace itself, taking front rank in the series of pioneer iron works of the State, was a perfectly simple affair, very like a limekiln in appearance, and not different from the other furnaces of colonial times, several of which were in blast at that period in the near neighborhood of Tennessee.
It was after the fashion of the blast furnaces of ancient Briton, and was heavy, stolid, massive, a heritage of the Roman iron makers which was carried over seas to the American colonies, intact and centuries old.
The illustrations of Brighthope and Tannehill are examples.
“This furnace was rudely constructed and very unlike those of to-day. It must have been lined inside with some kind of fire proof bricks, but certain it is that the greater portion of the building was limestone rock quarried from the bluffs nearby.
“The furnace proper was somewhat conical in shape, being from twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter at the base and narrowing at a height of about twenty-five feet into a short smokestack.
“The furnace and smokestack together were not over fifty feet high. The blast which heated the furnace was supplied by a kind of bellows run by water power.
“One of the most interesting features of the plant was a large forge hammer weighing five hundred pounds.
“It was lifted by water power and let fall by its own weight upon the piece of iron to be forged, thus doing the work that is now done by the rolling mills.”
This huge hammer also served to break up any extra hard lumps or boulders of the iron ore which were too bulky for use in the furnace.
Miss Liza Ann Hamilton and Mrs. Jane Sherrill, of Franklin County, to this day distinctly recall hearing, long ago, the incessant throb and ring of the big hammer, sounding day and night over the country for miles and miles.
Joseph Heslip obtained his ore from the neighboring hills.
“This was all surface ore,” says Charles E. Wilson, “which the farmers were glad to give the furnace people to get it out of the way for tilling the soil.”
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Genuine pioneer beginnings for the iron business can thus be discerned from the Cedar Creek attempt and from the records of the frontier smiths and early iron makers.
The first blast furnace antedates, by twelve years, the first cotton mill in Alabama. It is coincident with the first organized effort at river transportation, with the incorporation of the St. Stephens Steam boat Company; the establishment of the first banks of the territory, at St. Stephens and Huntsville; and with the founding of the first institution of learning beyond the log cabin schools, the old St. Stephens Academy.
From every view point, industrial, financial, educational, and political, the year 1818 is of tremendous import in Alabama history, quite apart from its significance in these chronicles as the birth year of the blast furnace.
The whole territory was being driven at racing gait into statehood, though under steady reins.
As to the man holding these reins, William Wyatt Bibb, first governor of both Territory and State, he stood stalwartly for law and order and urged progress in diverse lines.
For instance, he organized the three judicial districts, repealed the laws upon usury, advocated road making, bridge building, placing of ferries, making of schools, and he endeavored to suppress Indian outrages in the ceded lands.
He appointed an engineer to examine the rivers and report how navigation might be improved.
Further, in 1818, Governor Bibb formed thirteen new counties, a number of which are in the mineral belt.
He altered the boundaries of various then existing counties and prevented encroachment of Mississippi.
He placed, in short, some semblance of the yoke of government upon the crude, wild young country, and gave it foundation on which to build.
He was a quiet sort, this William Bibb, a man with a clear vision and steady nerve; gifted, too, with a certain quick sense of diagnosis.
Doubtless his several years’ practice as a surgeon bred in him those precise qualities that stood young Alabama in such good stead.
At any rate, President Monroe, translating the young Georgian from his seat in the United States Senate to governorship of what was then a world of half breeds, soldiers, and emigrants, had his faith in the man fully justified.
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The Alabama Classic Commemorative Silver Half Dollar Coin with William Wyatt Bibb on the reverse shows below an image of the blast furnace at Tannehill, part of a state historical park today.
