Word: vulcanizing
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...world. An intricate block & tackle was set up and, to the banging of hammers & chisels the head of Birmingham's "Iron Man," marvel of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, was pulled off and lowered to the ground. After 30 years of neglect Birmingham's Vulcan was about to be moved to the top of the same Red Mountain from which much of the ore he is made...
...Chamber of Commerce met for luncheon to decide what sort of exhibit the Pittsburgh of the South should send to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at St. Louis. Secretary James Arthur MacKnight had an idea: Birmingham was famed for its iron foundries. Why not a huge statue of Vulcan, something to hold its own with New York's Statue of Liberty, but made from Alabama cast iron...
...award of the commission to Sculptor Moretti was followed by weeks of haggling over models. Up for debate was the question of whether Birmingham's Vulcan should be ugly and misshapen, as mythology insists, or a handsome Hermes as many Alabamians insisted. The ugly Vulcan won. Plaster casts were made during the winter and the hulking Vulcan, 50 ft. 6 in. from head to toe, was cast by the James R. McWane Foundry. The finished product weighed 60 tons...
Shipped in sections on a special freight train, Vulcan broke every tackle in St. Louis before he was finally bolted together in the centre of the mines and manufacturing exhibition buildings. An inscription for the base was supplied by one of Birmingham's leading citizens, John Henry Adams...
When the St. Louis Fair closed Vulcan was knocked apart again, shipped back to Birmingham. Nobody wanted him. The huge sections were dumped off the freight cars to lie rusting in the weeds by a railroad siding. After three years Vulcan was re-erected at the entrance of the Fair Grounds, his damaged left arm propped up by a huge timber...