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The unknown story of the Jewish role in building Montgomery and Sheffield, Al. By Michael Feldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
From the first Sephardic settlers in North America who
engaged in shipping and overseas trade, to retailing
geniuses like the Straus and Rosenwald families,
America's Jewish entrepreneurs have been associated
with trade and commerce. Some, however, have dreamed
of founding great industrial cities.
One such dreamer was Alfred Huger Moses (1840-1918),
the oldest son and one of nine children born in
Charleston, SC to Levy and Adeline Moses. In the 18th
and early 19th centuries, Charleston had been a major
center of American Jewish life and many of its leading
retailers and merchants were Jewish. However,
Charleston's slave-owning planter aristocracy looked
down on those "in trade." A non-Jewish commentator
wrote in 1818, "I should think my own father an
accomplished knave if he had at any time made money in
the dry-goods line in King Street [Charleston's
commercial thoroughfare]. They are all Jews and worse
than Jews-Yankees, for a Yankee can Jew a Jew
directly."
Alfred Moses had higher ambitions than to remain in an
atmosphere unfavorable to Jews and commercial
enterprise. In 1860, at age twenty, after graduating from
the College of Charleston, Alfred moved to
Montgomery, Alabama, a city that balanced its traditional cotton
economy with commerce and manufacturing. Moses
apprenticed in a local law office. When the Civil War
erupted in April, 1861 he became the clerk of the
Confederate District Court in Montgomery and a member
of the Alabama Rebels, a civil defense volunteer militia
company.
During the war, Alfred's brothers Mordecai and Henry
joined him in Montgomery. When hostilities ended, the
three brothers entered the city's heavily depressed real
estate market. By the 1870s, the brothers developed one
of Montgomery's leading real estate investment firms. In
1875, Mordecai Moses was the first Jew elected mayor of
Montgomery and later served as president of the
Montgomery Gas and Electric Light Company. In 1887,
the brothers financed the Moses Building, Montgomery's
first "skyscraper."
By 1880, coal and iron ore discovered in the northern
reaches of the state created an economic boom in the
railroad junction town of Birmingham, which grew into a
great steel manufacturing city. Alfred Moses envisioned
building a city that would surpass Birmingham. In 1883,
Moses toured some mines near Florence, Alabama.
Viewing the rolling hills across the Tennessee River from
Florence, Moses thought he found the ideal spot for a
new city, which he named Sheffield after the great steel
producing city in England.
Moses and a partner purchased the site and more than
30,000 adjacent acres of mineral lands. They
incorporated a company, then laid out streets and invited
railroads to lay tracks connecting Sheffield to
Birmingham, Mobile and Chicago. Moses promised to
construct a water system and a railroad link to Florence.
An investor announced plans to build a blast furnace that
would produce at least 100 tons of pig iron per day. In
three days in early 1884, Moses sold 75 acres in the
proposed town for $350,000, a profit of more than a
quarter of a million dollars over the purchase price of the
land.
A few days after the land sale, a number of New York
banks failed, including two that were financing the rail
link to Sheffield. Construction on the line stopped;
panicked owners dumped their newly acquired land in
Sheffield and the iron foundry investor backed out.
Sheffield property became worthless and Alfred Moses's
dream seemed a failure.
Yet, Moses possessed the emotional and financial
strength to endure and by the end of 1884 he started
building houses and grading streets. By 1885, railroad
construction resumed and, in 1886, the first blast
furnace was operating. In February of 1887, the Alabama
and Tennessee Iron and Coal Company decided to make
Sheffield the center of its operations and erected three
more furnaces. Moses's endurance had borne fruit. Stock
in the Moses-controlled Sheffield Land, Iron and Coal
Company rose rapidly.
By 1891, however, the enterprise failed permanently,
along with the Moses family bank in Montgomery. Alfred
Moses had miscalculated the willingness of railroads to
link Sheffield with major cities and had overestimated the
region's iron ore supply. When the market price for iron
dropped below $12 per ton, less than the cost for
Sheffield's foundries to produce and deliver it, the town's
furnaces were banked and most of its residents
departed. Moses and his family moved to St. Louis and
lived there for another thirty years in greatly reduced
circumstances, his dreams destroyed by the boom and
bust cycle of the Gilded Age.
However, all was not lost for the Moses children. Alfred's
daughter Adeline met Carl M. Loeb, a twenty-year old
Jewish metals dealer employed by a German firm to work
in the St. Louis office of their subsidiary, the American
Metal Company. Adeline and Carl married, and Carl went
on to found the great investment banking firm of Loeb,
Rhoads.
Sheffield's blast furnaces were reopened in 1901 but
went bankrupt again in 1907. Eventually, U.S. Steel
bought the furnaces, but closed them for good on the
eve of the Depression in 1929. Today, Sheffield is a small
industrial city no longer producing iron or steel. Alfred
Moses and his wife are buried in Montgomery, Alabama,
where he had his greatest success, rather than Sheffield,
a city he envisioned, built but then
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Michael Feldberg is Director of Research for the American Jewish Historical Society. Comment by clicking here.
David Seixas Stands Accused: 1821
© 2010, Michael Feldberg | ||||||||||||
