Bringing to Life Birmingham’s Iron Age
By Charles Buchanan
For nearly 90 years, Sloss Furnaces helped fuel Birmingham’s booming growth, drawing hundreds of families to live and work in the shadow of the massive iron plant. Today Sloss curator—and UAB history instructor—Karen Utz is learning about this vanished way of life and sharing it with her students. In the process, she is shedding new light on a key, but often overlooked, era in the city’s past.
In this slideshow, Utz describes how she uses oral histories and even recipes to preserve the stories of Birmingham ironworkers.