Buffalo Paper - A Description of the Semet-Solvay By-Product Coke-Oven Plant at Ensley, Ala. (Discussion, 873)

An official of one of the prominent iron companies of the South recently made the following statement during a discussion of the present conditions of the Southern iron business: " The trouble with us in the South has been that we have been satisfied to buy iron and coal lands, build blast-furnaces, and make pig-iron. We stopped at pig-iron, and as a result we are all poor. The South needs diversified industries, and needs to work up its raw products into articles the Southern market can use. If we had realized this sooner, some of us might now be rich." The South is awakening to this view, and in the Birmingham district alone one basic steel-mill is already in operation, and in a year's time another and much larger one will be turning out rails and shapes, with rod- and wire-mills in prospect. It is to chronicle another metallurgical step forward in the same district that I have prepared the following description of the new by-product retort coke-oven plant recently put in opera-