This breathtaking view from the west includes the furnaces in the background, the casting sheds projecting forward, and in the foreground iron ingots everywhere, stacked like cordwood, awaiting their turn to be loaded onto railroad cars, shipped, and probably made into cast-iron pipe. (Photograph courtesy the Woodward Family Papers, W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama.)

The Making and Unmaking of The Woodward Iron Company
By Michael W. Fazio

Today, from the interstate in Birmingham you can still see remains of the Woodward Iron Company, which was founded in 1881 and didn't cease production until 1973. Michael Fazio tells the story of the Woodward family who created the company that would be called the "most vertically integrated ironmaking system on Earth." The Woodward Iron Company was founded by Stimpson Harvey Woodward, an ironmaker from Massachusetts, and its dynasty was born in 1882 when the first mine was opened on Red Mountain. A virtual boomtown followed: miles of railroad track, four locomotives, fifty railroad cars, sixty-three single coke ovens, eighty double coke ovens, and housing for over a thousand employees, all of which later became the town of Woodward. Michael Fazio describes the rise of the Woodward Iron Company throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a rise that contributed to a national iron industry that overtook England as the world's leading producer of the metal. The iron boom couldn't last forever, though, and as the company moved into the early 1900s, iron prices dropped, and everyone in the industry suffered. This included the Woodwards, who lost millions of dollars before the Great Depression. The story of the Woodward Iron Company is as much about the Woodward family and their struggles as it is about the rise and fall of the iron industry in Alabama.

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Best friends, Jim Lawrence (right) and Don Cornett (left), smile for the camera aboard the transport Maurice Rose, bound for Vietnam. Three months later, Cornett would fall in the battle at LZ Albany, and Lawrence would survive two point-blank shots to the head. (Photograph courtesy Jim Lawrence.)

The Lost Battalion of the Ia Drang
By Philip D. Beidler

Mel Gibson was praised for his performance as U.S. Army Lieutenant General Harold Moore in last year's blockbuster We Were Soldiers, based on Hal Moore's book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. In it, Moore describes the first vicious, but victorious, days of fighting in the Ia Drang valley of Vietnam. Philip Beidler's article picks up where the movie left off, telling the story of a tragic, terrifying ambush--a story that would never be fit for the silver screen. At the center of the horror of the battle was a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant from Troy, Alabama, named Jim Lawrence. Phil Beidler tells Jim's first-person account of what it was like to be in the middle of an enemy ambush. Jim Lawrence survived being shot point blank in the head and left for dead. He was rescued, and after he recovered from this injury, he went back to Vietnam to finish out his term in the army. Lawrence's story is one of personal victory set in the larger context of the victory of an outnumbered group of young soldiers who refused defeat in their first experience with combat.

Jim Lawrence has written a book of verse about his experience in the Ia Drang Valley called Reflections of Albany: The Agony of Vietnam. If you are interested in more information about his book, feel free to contact Jim at JimL@lah-re.com.

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This aerial photograph of Alabama's capitol complex, circa 1947, shows the area around the Alabama capitol in transition from a residential neighborhood to a monumental government complex. The houses on two blocks adjacent to the capitol had been cleared for two of the three buildings that were built according to the Olmsted Plan. The Archives and History Building (to the right in the photograph) is located on axis with the southern portico of the capitol. The Public Safety Building (in the lower center of the photograph) is sited at a forty-five-degree angle to the main axis of the capitol. The matching State Office Building was constructed in 1954. Photograph courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History.)

Great and Illustrious Work: The 1930 Olmsted Plan for the Alabama Capitol
By Mary Walton Upchurch

In the 1930s Alabama's capitol underwent a transformation. As Governor Bibb Graves completed his final term in office, he could watch with satisfaction the changes he had brought to the state capitol. Once just a building, Alabama's capitol was becoming a stately urban center. Governor Bibb had sought out the Olmsted Brothers—whose famous father had designed Central Park in New York City and the "Emerald Necklace" of parks in Boston—to design a plan for the new capitol. Mary Walton Upchurch walks through various aspects of the Olmsted Plan and points out its unique and creative design for the capitol. Although the Olmsted Plan wasn't used in its entirety, the influence of this famous landscape architecture firm can be seen in several of the buildings and in the beautiful grounds that surround Capitol Hill.

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