Sloss Furnace Company founder Col. James W. Sloss.By Anne Ruisi
In 1871, the squalid jumble of tents, shanties and boxcars that eventually became the Magic City sat at one end of a 67-mile railroad gap in North Central Alabama between Birmingham and Decatur.
That’s until a North Alabama railroad man, Col. James W. Sloss, struck a deal with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad to close that gap with rail construction that led to an explosion of development and the birth of the mining and steel industry that earned Birmingham another soubriquet, Pittsburgh of the South.
Sloss, who 10 years later founded Sloss Furnace Company and began construction of the city’s first blast furnace, and two of his descendants, Birmingham real estate developers A. Page Sloss Sr. and Arthur Page “Pete” Sloss Jr., will be honored Aug. 24 when they are inducted into the Kiwanis Club of Birmingham’s Business Hall of Fame. The event, the Kiwanis Club’s 25th induction, will be from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Harbert Center.
Three other Hall of Famers to be honored that evening are retired UAB Health System CEO Dr. Will Ferniany, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s Odessa Woolfolk and the late Carrie Tuggle, who in the early 20th century founded a boarding school for black boys that later became the renowned Tuggle Institute.
The Kiwanis Club of Birmingham annually selects business leaders to honor who have exemplified strong leadership and made extraordinary contributions to the Greater Birmingham area. To date, the club has inducted 147 Birmingham business leaders into the Hall of Fame, according to a press release from the club. Those honored can be living or deceased.
James W. Sloss, according to the rich details in his biography on the Sloss Furnaces website, became involved in railroads in the 1850s. Fifteen years later, after the Civil War, he was president of the Nashville and Decatur line. It was during this postwar period that Sloss became one of the chief proponents of Alabama’s industrial development, leading to the railroad deal that led to Birmingham’s founding.
“Anxious to tap the rich mineral resources surrounding Birmingham, Sloss, along with fellow Birmingham promoters Henry DeBardeleben and James Aldrich, acquired 30,000 acres and formed the Pratt Coal and Coke Company,” the biography says.
“Pratt soon became the largest mining enterprise in the district. In the early 1880s, with the backing of Henry DeBardeleben, Sloss founded the Sloss Furnace Company, and two years later ‘blew-in’ the second blast furnace in Birmingham. Called City Furnaces, the plant was at the eastern edge of downtown, at the intersection of two major railroads. The majority of Sloss pig iron ended up in Cincinnati, Louisville, Chicago, and Cleveland. Pig iron costs in Northern plants averaged $18.30 per ton in 1884 while pig iron in the South could be produced for $10 to $11 a ton. By the 1880s, Birmingham was booming and had earned the nickname The Magic City.”
Sloss retired in 1886 and sold the company to a group of financiers who guided it through a period of rapid expansion. The company reorganized in 1899 as Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron, but it never made steel, the biography says. With the acquisition of furnaces and extensive mineral lands in northern Alabama, Sloss-Sheffield became the second largest merchant pig iron company in the Birmingham District.
James W. Sloss continued to be interested in iron and steel-making until his death in 1890. Praising Sloss, an obituary in the national trade journal, “Iron Age,” stressed “his farseeing discernment, indomitable energy and modern ideas.”
Sloss Furnaces today is a National Historic Landmark, so designated in 1981. It opened as a museum two years later and has a collection consisting of two 400-ton blast furnaces and about 40 other buildings.
James W. Sloss’s descendants, grandson A. Page Sloss Sr. and great-grandson Arthur Page “Pete” Sloss, inherited their ancestor’s entrepreneurial spirit, only in their field of real estate.
Continuing Family Dedication
A. Page Sloss Sr. started his real estate company in 1920, according to the Sloss Real Estate website. He was about 25 years old at the time. His son, A. Page “Pete” Sloss, Jr., born in 1925, joined the business after serving in World War II and in Korea.
Among his early projects were neighborhood housing developments in Titusville, Homewood and Mountain Brook, all needed in post-war Birmingham, according to his obituary published in August 2019.
Sloss father and son then focused more on commercial real estate, further developing Five Points West, the first shopping center in Alabama. They bought and developed properties in Birmingham and Laredo and Eagle Pass, Texas.
When A. Page Sloss died in 1974, Pete Sloss’s daughter Cathy Sloss-Jones joined the business, the obituary said. Over the next 40 years, they built and developed an impressive portfolio of iconic properties in Birmingham, including Ridge Park, Park Place, One Federal Place, the Young and Vann Building and the historic landmark district known as Pepper Place.
Pete Sloss served on the board of Sloss Furnaces and the Southern Museum of Flight before his death at 93 in 2019.
Today, Pete’s daughter, Sloss-Jones, is president and CEO of Sloss Real Estate.
Ferniany, Woolfolk and Tuggle Also Named to Kiwanis Hall of Fame
While the Sloss family has had a major impact on Birmingham since the city’s founding, the 2023 Kiwanis Business Hall of Fame inductees also include three other leaders. Dr. Will Ferniany, Odessa Woolfolk and the late Carrie A. Tuggle were singled out for outstanding achievements in their fields.
Ferniany, who was chief executive officer of the UAB Health System and the UAB/Ascension St. Vincent’s Alliance, retired in January 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. As CEO of the alliance, he oversaw a $5 billion, 11-hospital health system.
During Ferniany’s tenure as CEO, the UAB Health System grew from five hospitals to 11, with revenues expanding from $2.3 billion in 2008 to more than $5.8 billion.
Woolfolk, one of the founders and founding board chair of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, is a former educator and renowned civil rights and community leader.
Born in Birmingham, she graduated from Talladega College and went on to earn a master’s degree in urban studies from Occidental College. She completed graduate studies at the University of Chicago and Yale University, where she was a National Urban Fellow, according to the Alabama Academy of Honor website.
She was a teacher at the former Ullman High School in the midst of the civil rights movement and later pursued a career in public policy. She joined the faculty of UAB in 1972 as director of its Center for Urban Affairs, then held other positions there until she retired in 1993.
In the late 1980s, Woolfolk began working toward the creation of a civil rights museum in Birmingham, which opened in 1993 as the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
Tuggle, founder of the Tuggle Institute, now Tuggle Elementary School, was born in Eufaula in 1858, according to the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame website. She and her husband came to Birmingham at the turn of the 20th century and over the next 20 years, the mother of four excelled in the areas of education, social work and religion.
She was working with delinquent boys and as a welfare officer when she conceived the idea of providing housing facilities for orphaned black children. At first children lived in her home, but by 1903 she and her supporters had raised enough funding to open a one-building school and residence for homeless black boys in western Birmingham’s Enon Ridge neighborhood.
Tuggle Institute grew and was highly regarded in the early 20th century. The late Birmingham businessman A.G. Gaston and jazz great Erskine Hawkins were among its graduates. In 1926 the school became affiliated with Birmingham city schools.
As a result of her work as a welfare officer, which involved appearances in the courtroom, Tuggle was instrumental in the formation of the Jefferson Couty Juvenile and Domestic Court, the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame website said.
Tuggle, who also worked for women’s suffrage, died in 1924 and is buried on the grounds of the school named in her honor.
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