IRON ORES: RED ORB. H 



Much mining of red ore has been done- near Gate City, Vil- 

 lage Springs, Springville, Attalla, Gadsden, Round Moun- 

 tain, Gaylesville, Ft. Payne, Valley Head, etc., but the most Im- 

 portant development of the Clinton ore in the state and in the 

 world, is along the 15 or 16 mile stretch of the East Red 

 Mountain between Birmingham and Bessemer, and there is a 

 practically continuous series of mines, and strippings for this 

 entire distance. The ore here is in three different seams, but 

 the upper fifteen feet of ;the Big Seam or Red Mountain seam, 

 have furnished almost the entire supply of ore to the 23 furn- 

 aces of the district. 



Plate I shows the outcrop of this seam near Birmingham. 



Tn a large part of this stretch of Red Mountain, the ore has 

 been gained by stripping down to where the cover becomes 

 fifteen or twenty feet thick over the ore and too expensive to 

 remove. 



Most of the ore, however, is obtained from well developed 

 deep mines going down on the slope of the bed. These mines 

 are equipped with all the latest and most improved devices 

 for the cheap handling of the ore. The deepest of these mines 

 at the present time has gone down en the dip of the bed a dis- 

 tance of 1850 feet from the outcrop. The ore is brought by 

 small mine cars from the different entries to the main slope 

 and there emptied into a skip holding from 12 to 14 tons. The 

 skips are hauled to the surface by steam power, the ore is 

 dumped automatically into the crushers and thence into the 

 railroad cars. This arrangement very greatly increases the 

 handling capacitv, and is intendecj to work to a depth of about 

 a mile. When fully equipped the Red ore mines of the Ten- 

 nessee Coal, Iron and Railroad company alone will have a ca- 

 pacitv estimated at 10,000 tons a day. 



The ore of the Big Seam improves in qualitv towards the 

 southwest, the percentage of lime increasing while that of si- 

 lica decreases. The percentage of alumina remains about con- 

 stant, but on account of the coming in of slate partings, more 

 care has to be exercised in the mining. 



The lower and major part of the Big Seam has not been 

 worked except verv sparingly at the outcrop, being too silic- 

 eous, with the silica increasing from top to bottom of the 

 seam. 



