Birmingham
— a city the iron remembers.
Not only on a wall.
“Birmingham was founded in 1871 at the intersection of two railroads and the iron, coal, and limestone the Jones Valley happened to hold under one ridge. The Sloss Furnaces still stand. Vulcan still stands over the city from Red Mountain: at 56 feet, the largest cast-iron statue in the world. The 16th Street Baptist Church still holds Sunday service on the corner where the country's mind changed.
Birmingham, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Birmingham was founded on 1 June 1871 at the crossing of the Alabama & Chattanooga and South & North Alabama railroads, in the Jones Valley of north-central Alabama. The site held the three ingredients of iron-making, coal, iron ore, and limestone, within a few miles of each other, and the city grew on furnaces and rolling mills through the late nineteenth century. The municipal population at the 2020 census was 200,733, with the metropolitan area at about 1.1 million. The University of Alabama at Birmingham, established in 1969, is now the city's largest employer.
Birmingham's identity sits on the south-east slope of Red Mountain, where the red Clinton iron ore that gave the city its first industry was mined from the 1870s onward. Vulcan, the 56-foot cast-iron statue of the Roman god of the forge, has stood at the summit since 1939, the largest cast-iron statue in the world, originally cast for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. The Sloss Furnaces, blown in 1882 and operated continuously until 1971, sit east of downtown and are now a National Historic Landmark and an open-air industrial museum.
Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport sits five miles north-east of the centre and reaches downtown in about fifteen minutes. The Birmingham Civil Rights District, designated a National Monument in 2017, holds the 16th Street Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on adjacent corners of Sixth Avenue North. Vulcan Park and Museum, on Red Mountain, gives the long view across the Jones Valley. Sloss Furnaces, just east of downtown, opens free of charge most days. The downtown loop is walkable; most other distances are short drives.