Archival Resources

by George Clinton Thompson

Several years earlier Jackson had invested his talents in the coal fields west of town, and in 1899 he had moved with his family to the burgeoning new metropolis of Birmingham to become general manager of Alabama Consolidated Coal and Iron Company. Having risen to a position of corporate power, he now enjoyed the respect of the city's most influential business leaders; indeed, in the next few months those leaders would elect Jackson president of the Commercial Club of Birmingham, forerunner to the Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce.

In 1903 Fred Jackson might have begun coasting to retirement, enjoying the rewards of his labor and good fortune. But Jackson was not a man to rest on his laurels. Turn-of-the-century Birmingham was a robust community still trying to shape its character and its identity. Fred Jackson found the challenges ahead exciting, and with his newly expanded power and influence, he intended to have a hand in fashioning the future of the city.

The Commercial Club, whose presidency Jackson assumed in October 1903, was far more than a social club; it was a group of civic-minded business leaders who were willing to put their club's name and their own funds at risk to invest in the future of the city. In 1897, for example, in an effort to bring steel production to Alabama, the Commercial Club had provided Birmingham Rolling Mills $40,000 of the capital needed to build two open-hearth steel furnaces which would utilize Alabama-cast pig iron. The gamble paid off. Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI) constructed a steel plant in Ensley and produced its first commercial run of steel on Thanksgiving Day, two years later.

Also in 1897, the Commercial Club had negotiated with the Trainer family of Pennsylvania to furnish machinery and provide technical management for the creation of Birmingham's first cotton mill, Avondale Mills. Although the Trainers withdrew in mid-project, Avondale's president, B. B. Comer, aided by $150,000 capital from the Commercial Club, succeeded in establishing Avondale Mills as a supplier of calico cloth.

As president of the Commercial Club, Fred M. Jackson embraced the Club's legacy, and immediately after he assumed office he seized the first opportunity to propel Birmingham into a propitious national light. Within seven months, on April 30,1904, the St. Louis World's Fair would open. Officially named "The Louisiana Purchase Exposition," the fair celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the single most fortuitous land acquisition in United States history. All but three states had secured an exhibit, with Alabama one of the holdouts. Jackson intended to rectify this situation.

Jackson and fellow club member James A. MacKnight realized the invaluable exposure Birmingham would receive by exhibiting at a world's fair. Their young city, only thirty-two years old, had already made a name for itself in the South as a diversified industrial center and a home to approximately forty thousand people. Thanks to Birmingham and surrounding communities, Alabama had become fourth among states in the production of iron and steel. Jackson and MacKnight knew this opportunity to showcase Birmingham to the world was too timely to ignore.

In fact, MacKnight had been interested in an exhibit since the previous spring, when he had accompanied visitors from Cincinnati through the prodigious steel works in Ensley. The visitors' awe and enthusiasm upon seeing the operation convinced MacKnight that others should learn of Alabama's immense mineral resources and of the state's ability to bring those resources to commercial ends.

As MacKnight envisioned it, Alabama's exhibit would be a great statue, a colossus built locally and composed solely from Alabama minerals-something that would tower over other exhibits at the St. Louis Fair. But when he presented his ideas to state officials, they failed to see the promise of his plan.

That fall MacKnight received a much warmer reception when he presented his idea to the Commercial Club. Here the mood was decidedly optimistic. Without question, members said, Birmingham should be represented in St. Louis. But, was seven months sufficient time to devise and construct an exhibit that would adequately convey the Birmingham spirit to the world, especially a spirit the size of MacKnight's leviathan iron man? Why certainly! the members responded. How better to show the world Birmingham's capabilities than to erect a gargantuan statue in record time. And who more appropriate to act as emissary for the city than Vulcan, the Roman god whose deeds as architect, smith, armorer, chariot builder, and artist were essential to the very foundations of mythology?

Hubris ruled. The Commercial Club agreed to raise $15,000 and a committee was organized to proceed with the exhibit. While MacKnight set out to lay the groundwork with officials in St. Louis, Fred Jackson, in his role as club president, began searching for financial support. Among those to whom Jackson appealed was Charles P. Lane, president of the Alabama Industrial and Commercial Association, who endorsed the project, gave the exhibit its official name "Alabama Mineral Exhibit"-and assisted Jackson in obtaining endorsements from approximately twenty counties throughout the state.

By early November, the project was looking promising. Not only was money coming in, but through MacKnight's efforts fair officials in St. Louis, showing great enthusiasm for the project, had committed two thousand square feet of exhibit space at the Palace of Mines, Mining and Metallurgy Division.

MacKnight now turned his attention to the more difficult task of locating a suitable sculptor. His ebullience may have lagged slightly after his encounter with Boston sculptor C. E. Dallin, who told him "that such a statue would require two to three years to make, and anyone who thought it Could be done in less time, was off the rails."

Finally, MacKnight's appeals, probably made through industrial contacts in Pittsburgh, led him to a sculptor of rising prominence in New York, Giuseppe Moretti.

The forty-six-year-old artist, a native of Siena, Italy, had immigrated to the United States in 1888. Possessed of a keen intellect, handsome features, and a sonorous voice, Moretti was a gifted singer who had considered a career in the opera. Concluding that his greatest talents lay in the realm of sculpting, he studied at the Royal Academy of Belle Arte in Florence and earned his living for a time as a marble worker in Carrara. From there he began a life's trek in search of fine marble and opportunities with which to display his talent.

After settling in New York, Moretti found it more difficult than he had expected to establish himself as a sculptor. For a while, he found employment with the noted architect Richard Morris Hunt, who designed, among other works, an opulent Italian villa for William K. Vanderbilt in Newport Beach, Rhode Island, as well as the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. Moretti's first major domestic opportunity came with the Edward M.

Bigelow statue in Highland Park, Pittsburgh. Several commissions followed in Pittsburgh and in other cities, including a bronze statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt on the grounds of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

When Moretti learned of the challenging mission laid out by Birmingham's Commercial Club to build the giant iron man for the St. Louis World's Fair, he leaped to the fore. In retrospect, his involvement was truly auspicious. It is questionable whether another sculptor could have been found who combined such talent and enthusiasm for the project. By late November, Moretti had contracted with MacKnight and the Commercial Club for a sum of $6,000 to design and supervise casting and erection of the colossus, Vulcan.

The first of many problems arose almost immediately as a spirited discussion commenced between Moretti and club officials over the physical appearance of the statue. Although Vulcan was the undisputed workhorse of Roman mythology, he was also a lame, ugly god, who had ostensibly suffered derision from his parents Jupiter and Juno, and perfidy from his wife Venus. Moretti wanted to portray him as a strong but none-too-handsome colossus. The Commercial Club had something more attractive in mind. Moretti prevailed.

Immediately he began work in his New York studio at 152 West Thirty-eighth Street, where he completed an eight-foot working clay statue of Vulcan. Next, he located and secured a space large enough to produce the full-size, fifty-six-foot clay model. The building itself was an unfinished church, St. Stephens, in Passaic, New Jersey. Here, during December, Moretti and sixteen assistants quickly completed the clay model from which they would next make a plaster mold and then a plaster model. In the unheated and drafty St. Stephen's, portions of the day model's head and posterior froze and had to be repaired.

The creation of such a mammoth figure in the church created much excitement locally, and hundreds of workers from a nearby woolen mill came regularly to view the giant Vulcan. According to the Newark Daily,

By the end of January 1904, Moretti began shipping sections of the plaster model to Birmingham.

While progress with the statue's construction was meeting or surpassing all expectations, funding for the exhibit also appeared to be going well. Dollars came quickly at first. Even before Moretti had been contacted, the Jefferson County Board of Revenue had committed $5,000. Soon afterward, $500 commitments were received each from the City of Birmingham; District No. 20 of the United Mine Workers of America; the Birmingham Belt Railway Company; Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company; the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company; and a $300 gift was received from the First National Bank.

Yet, the same naive optimism that earned the Commercial Club accolades for tackling the ambitious Vulcan project led them to drastically underestimate the total costs involved. Their initial estimate of $15,000 proved to be barely half of what would be needed, and Fred Jackson was having difficulty raising even that. To complicate matters further, some of the money Jackson had counted on did not materialize, including a state grant of $10,000 and $500 commitments from the neighboring cities of Ensley, Pratt City, and Woodlawn. By early February, the Vulcan Fund stood at a paltry $8,477, and Fred Jackson was worried.

By February 13, 1904, sections of Vulcan's plaster mold had arrived in Birmingham, via Southern Railroad, and had been shipped to the recently formed Birmingham Steel and Iron Company, located at 1421 First Avenue North. The company's president, James R .McWane of Birmingham, eager to cast what would be the largest iron statue in the world, had tendered a bid substantially below his competitors. Additionally, in preparation for the gigantic statue, McWane had had his foundry floor excavated to accommodate the prodigious molds needed for casting.

On February 18, the flamboyant Signor Moretti, accompanied by a personal chef and two assistants, arrived at the Birmingham train depot and, to his dismay, found no one waiting to greet him. Maintaining his composure and good humor, the sculptor walked to the Commercial Club's offices in the Linn Building and introduced himself to embarrassed officials. With the Club's assistance, Moretti established temporary quarters in the Hillman Hotel and soon set up a studio across the street from the foundry where he would supervise the casting process.

The first of fifteen castings was poured March 11. Moretti was quite pleased with the casting of the waist and upper thighs, weighing approximately 12,000 pounds. In fact, he regarded most of the preparations for casting through March and early April as quite successful. An unfortunate exception was the last and most important piece, the head. In March, the plaster model for the head had been dropped and damaged severely, requiring three days for Moretti to repair. Foundrymen then took special pains in preparing the brick and loam mold for the head, dealing carefully with the myriad of minute details associated with the face and beard. It was, according to many, the most difficult casting ever attempted in Alabama to date.

On Monday, April 18, Vulcan's long-awaited head emerged triumphant from the sandy waste of broken mold in time to see his lower anatomy heading to St. Louis "feet first" via the Frisco system. Both Commercial Club and World's Fair officials were eager to see Vulcan erected by opening day, April 30, but only part of the statue arrived on time. The thousands of opening day visitors to the fair's Palace of Mines saw no higher than Vulcan's knees. His torso was en route, and his head would not leave Birmingham until May 8, along with his hammer and anvil. It was clear, however, based on the reactions of visitors and journalists, that this colossus was no typical mineral exhibit. Vulcan, and his progenitor, Alabama, quickly became the talk of St. Louis.

As Vulcan neared completion in late May, visitors craned their necks to view this giant reaching fifty-six feet from pedestal to spear tip. His shoulders measured ten feet in width, and his chest nearly twenty-three feet in circumference. Moretti had deliberately distorted the statue's proportions, giving more mass to the head, shoulders, and chest, so that when viewed from below, the body would appear in correct proportion. The entire statue, including hammer and anvil block, was estimated to weigh some 120,000 pounds.

The man of iron was now complete, but funding for the statue, at roughly $17,000, was woefully behind, due to no lack of imagination on the part of Fred Jackson. When public contributions began to dry up in the spring, Jackson and fellow club members had turned to more creative funding techniques. A mass meeting was planned at the Jefferson Theatre for March 4, with a presentation by Jackson and entertainment by noted local singers. Even Vulcan's sculptor, Signor Moretti, had agreed to perform a solo. Much excitement was elicited by the announcement, especially by the revelation that Moretti had once considered a career in the opera and was in fact a good friend of the famous Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso. That promising promotional gambit was cancelled, however, when key members of the entertainment failed to show.

Undaunted, Jackson devised new schemes. One effort included reassembling the plaster mold of Vulcan, painting it black to resemble its iron brother in St. Louis, displaying it on the grounds of the Birmingham Steel and Iron Company, and collecting a fee from viewers. The entire plan worked beautifully except that visitors balked at paying a fee and eventually were allowed free access to the plaster statue.

One of the more successful of Jackson's fund-raising efforts occurred in late March at an exhibition baseball game between the Birmingham Barons and the New York Giants, whose leading pitcher was "Iron Man" Joe McGinnity. Capitalizing on McGinnity's nickname, Jackson talked the ballplayer into stirring up pre-game publicity by helping with one of the pours at the foundry. More than two thousand people turned up to watch McGinnity pitch that afternoon, and the Vulcan Fund, aided by a percentage of ticket sales, gained another $500.

Probably the most successful promotion resulted from the contract Jackson established with a Danbury, Connecticut, firm to produce quantities of a Vulcan statuette. The twelve-inch-high, three-pound cast bronze replicas were sold both in Birmingham and St. Louis for two dollars apiece. Jackson formed a corporation and sold stock at fifty dollars a share to fund 2,000 statuettes. While it is doubtful the company retrieved its investment, statuette sales were eventually successful and aided the Vulcan Fund greatly.

Several weeks after Vulcan was erected in St. Louis, the Alabama Mineral Exhibit was dedicated on Tuesday, June 7. Dr. J. A. Holmes, chief of mines and metallurgy for the fair, spoke, as did the indefatigable Fred Jackson. But the highlight of the ceremony came when Jackson's twenty-year-old daughter, Miriam, christened the statue as one would christen a ship. Because Birmingham community leaders were pitted in a bitter political struggle with strong liquor and prostitution interests fighting proposed prohibition, alcoholic beverages were taboo in the Jackson family. Thus, Miriam christened Vulcan not with a bottle of champagne, but with a bottle of water from the erstwhile pristine Cahaba River.

In September 1904, Vulcan surprised no one by being awarded the Grand Prize for best exhibit in the Mineral Department of the fair. Another tribute to Alabama came when Signor Moretti was awarded a silver medal for his Head of Christ, a bust sculpted from Alabama marble, with which Moretti had become quite impressed during his stay in the state.

Vulcan's popularity reached its apex immediately prior to the fair's end, when officials from both St. Louis and San Francisco offered to buy the statue at a price considerably above its cost to the Commercial Club. Despite the fact that the Vulcan Fund was several thousand dollars in debt, Jackson and fellow club members voted to give the statue to Birmingham and Jefferson County with the stipulation that the statue be erected in Capitol Park (now Charles Linn Park). The Commercial Club did accept an invitation to send Vulcan to Portland, Oregon, for the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, an agreement on which they later reneged for lack of funds.

In October, the Vulcan Fund gained some relief when James R. McWane, whose firm had cast the statue, agreed to reduce his final bill from $10,070 to $7,800, noting that "Vulcan was a public project."

By November 1904, with approximately $4,000 in debt remaining, Jackson and the Commercial Club voted to spare the public further solicitations and committed to meet the debt from within the Club. Having withstood what he must have thought was the last major challenge in the Vulcan saga, Fred Jackson brought the iron man home.

The heady glow of fame enjoyed by Vulcan in St. Louis gave way to grim reality once the statue returned to Birmingham, where it was placed in pieces by the rail siding. There it lay unceremoniously for two years while city officials and the public argued over the statue's proper location. The city wanted it in Capitol Park; several society ladies did not. "Vulcan belongs on Red Mountain," the Birmingham Age-Herald quoted one prominent woman as saying. "It was never intended to be in a park with smaller monuments." In fact, the article noted, "the whole history of Vulcan has grown tiresome. No one wants to read anything about it, and how very tired people will grow if they are compelled to see it day after day in Capitol Park." Had this Roman god of mythology, this champion of Birmingham's future, now become an albatross around the city's neck?

Certainly the city must have thought so. Then Culpepper Exum stepped forward. President of the State Fair Association, Exum offered a home for Vulcan at the fairgrounds provided "somebody would pay the expense of transporting him." J. A. Emery, a fellow Commercial Club member, secured free passage for the statue via the L&N Railroad and the Birmingham & Bessemer Dummy Line. But Vulcan's ignominy was far from over. Workmen, in their haste to erect the statue prior to the fair's opening day, incorrectly installed both his right hand and his left arm. Vulcan could grasp neither his spear nor his hammer. Thus he stood for nearly three decades in silent shame, without a proper pedestal and with his tools just beyond reach. It is no wonder that the empty-handed iron man failed to command the respect he deserved.

Things went from bad to worse when advertising executives noticed the god's idleness and put him to work. For several years, Vulcan could be seen hawking a variety of products, from ice cream to pickles to cola. The nadir for Vulcan's tenure at the fairgrounds may have come after he traded his tunic for a pair of bright blue jeans which were painted on. His make-over also included black eyebrows and a flesh-tinted face.

At times looking more like a clown than a god, Vulcan had to wait until the 1930s before he was rescued from the fairgrounds by two members of Birmingham's Kiwanis Club, Thomas Joy and J. Mercer Barnett, who organized a citywide campaign to find the poor colossus a decent home. Thad Holt, state director for the Works Progress Administration, authorized construction of Vulcan Park on Red Mountain, home to the very ore from which the statue was cast. Holt appropriated $38,874 of W.P.A. funds toward the $44,062 total project cost. U.S. Steel donated the five acre site.

Although the project languished at times, the result was stunning. By 1939 the fifty-six-foot-tall Vulcan stood atop a 124 foot pedestal of native sandstone quarried just a few hundred yards away, finished inside with native marble. Once again holding his spear and his hammer, the man of iron dominated the skyline above Birmingham and Jones Valley.

In 1946, the Birmingham Jaycees made Vulcan a symbol of highway safety, surrounding his spear with a neon torch that shines green except during times of a traffic death, when it temporarily glows red.

By the late 1960s, the observation railing near the top of Vulcan's pedestal was deemed unsafe. This, along with the desire for an elevator, prompted support for a renovation that resulted in a $1 million face-lift, giving Vulcan a marble-sheathed pedestal (albeit Georgia marble) with a large, enclosed observation level. A new fountain, gift shop, and snack bar rounded out the project.

Not everyone was pleased with the renovations, however. Because the new observation deck had a roof, visitors could no longer see Vulcan close up; to many people the modern base and gleaming white marble seemed inappropriate to the rustic old statue and made Vulcan appear considerably smaller.

These problems, however, were merely cosmetic. The real problems lay inside. When Vulcan was first placed atop his pedestal in the 1930s, workers attempted to "stabilize" the statue by filling his cavity with concrete up to the shoulders. But concrete and iron expand and contract at different rates. Cracks began to appear in the statue, and concrete began to leach out available openings.

During the 1960s renovation, the cracks were repaired, but now they are back-at least forty feet in total length and many are in new locations. Rust holes are also a problem. Rain pours in a large hole in Vulcan's head, soaks through the concrete and seeps out the joints and cracks. The constantly wet interior rusts.

Today, the city of Birmingham is once again faced with the question of what to do about Vulcan: How long can the statue endure the elements and remain standing?

When Fred Jackson and members of the Commercial Club envisioned the colossus for the city almost a century ago, Birmingham was seen as an emerging giant in the iron and steel industry. Today, the financial base of Birmingham has changed, and iron and steel no longer dominate the economy. Like the smokestack industry he represented, the colossus of Vulcan is in decline. Untended and left to the elements, one day he may subside into the iron-rich earth from which he sprang.

(Alabama Heritage, No. 20, Spring 1991)