Art: Iron Man

At the entrance to the Alabama State Fair Grounds outside Birmingham last week WPA workmen raised timberscaffolding around the largest cast-iron statue in the world. An intricate block & tackle was set up and, to the banging of hammers & chisels the head of Birmingham’s “Iron Man,” marvel of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, was pulled off and lowered to the ground. After 30 years of neglect Birmingham’s Vulcan was about to be moved to the top of the same Red Mountain from which much of the ore he is made of was dug.

Early in 1903 the organization that later became Birmingham’s Chamber of Commerce met for luncheon to decide what sort of exhibit the Pittsburgh of the South should send to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at St. Louis. Secretary James Arthur MacKnight had an idea: Birmingham was famed for its iron foundries. Why not a huge statue of Vulcan, something to hold its own with New York’s Statue of Liberty, but made from Alabama cast iron?

Secretary MacKnight also had a sculptor to suggest: tousle-haired, thickset Giuseppe Moretti, of Siena, Italy. Faces beamed around the luncheon table, for Sculptor Moretti, at that time a tombstone designer for New England granite concerns, was the first artist of any ability to plump for Alabama marble as a medium for sculpture, insisted loudly that it was quite the equal of Carrara.

The award of the commission to Sculptor Moretti was followed by weeks of haggling over models. Up for debate was the question of whether Birmingham’s Vulcan should be ugly and misshapen, as mythology insists, or a handsome Hermes as many Alabamians insisted. The ugly Vulcan won. Plaster casts were made during the winter and the hulking Vulcan, 50 ft. 6 in. from head to toe, was cast by the James R. McWane Foundry. The finished product weighed 60 tons.

Shipped in sections on a special freight train, Vulcan broke every tackle in St. Louis before he was finally bolted together in the centre of the mines and manufacturing exhibition buildings. Aninscription for the base was supplied by one of Birmingham’s leading citizens, John Henry Adams:

“Just as my statue towers above the sons of earth, so shall the district from whose breast the ore and coal were torn and fused to give me birth, exceed all others in time’s march. For o’er and o’er nature hath flung her treasures with a generous hand and Birmingham sitsenthroned. Both hemispheres can draw on her; the mineral wealth of every land is there allied to rule the world in future years.”

When the St. Louis Fair closed Vulcan was knocked apart again, shipped back to Birmingham. Nobody wanted him. The huge sections were dumped off the freight cars to lie rusting in the weeds by a railroad siding. After three years Vulcan was re-erected at the entrance of the Fair Grounds, his damaged left arm propped up by a huge timber.

Two men who never forgot Birmingham’s cast-iron pride were John Henry Adams, author of the grandiloquent inscription, and Thomas Joy. As a child Thomas Joy sold the first newspaper ever to appear on the streets of Birmingham, later became a charter member of the local Kiwanis Club. Moving to Chicago Kiwanian Joy was immensely successful as aconstruction engineer, put up some $20,000,000 worth of buildings, finally retired to spend the rest of his life in his native Birmingham. Proud Kiwanians were anxious to gather him back in the fold, but Engineer Joy’s ideas had changed. “You’re nothing but a backslapping, song-singing, weekly-lunching bunch!” he snorted.

Later Thomas Joy made a proposal : he would join the Kiwanis Club again if the Kiwanis Club would get up a committee and start subscriptions to move Vulcan from his ignominious post at. the Fair Grounds. John Henry Adams was the first to join. Last May WPA went to the rescue with $44,000 in cash and the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. hastily offered a five-acre plot on top of Red Mountain two-and-a-half miles outside the city.

Sculptor Moretti who died last year would not recognize his Vulcan when WPA and Kiwanis are through with him. Glittering with aluminum paint and with his damaged arm repaired, he will stand on a 123-ft. pedestal on the mountaintop, bathed in floodlights and with a neon light flickering from the hammer in his hand. On a clear day farmers should be able to see him 50 miles away.