sider Middlesboro, Kentucky, for example: During the mid-s a young
Canadian capitalist persuaded English investors to buy up , acres of
mineral rights. In Middlesboro still had but residents, but the next
year, when an extension of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad reached
town, the population exploded to , in a few months. Iron and steel
mills and hotels sprang up, the city installed a waterworks, and nearby
towns built their own hotels and even a golf course. In , however, the
British investors suffered a failure and their capital infusions ceased; then
the American panic of killed the Canadian’s dream. Middlesboro re-
sorted to its previous, modest incarnation.
The Middlesboro dream had been inspired by northern Alabama’s great,
smoky, flame-belching metropolis-out-of-nowhere, Birmingham. Barely in
existence in , the city leaped upward and outward during the following
decade, gripped by a seemingly unstoppable boom. Birmingham had rail
connections rivaling Atlanta’s, and the hills of its hinterland shone darkly
with deposits of coal and iron ore. Alabama capitalists persisted through
trying times, built their homes upwind of the furnaces’ and mills’ acrid
effusions, and succeeded. Barely a Census Bureau city in , with ,
people, Birmingham had , in , , in , and (in part via
annexation) an amazing , in .
The upper South’s minor-league counterpart to Birmingham was Roa-
noke, in southwestern Virginia. As late as the early s, Roanoke’s future
site was the hamlet of Big Lick, home to about souls. Then the railroad
came, and within a decade a renamed hamlet became Virginia’s fourth-
largest city, at , and growing. Roanoke had its traditional southern
businesses, milling flour, canning vegetables, and packaging tobacco. But
its growth lay principally in the railroad’s initiatives in Roanoke’s hinter-
land: iron and zinc works from nearby Pulaski, farm implement and fur-
niture factories from Marion, and so on, with all production funneled
through Roanoke.
Louisville, a relatively old Ohio River port, long the rival of upriver Cin-
cinnati in transferring and shipping, took off to become one of the South’s
largest cities after it became a rail terminal, too. Likewise Louisville’s twin
in late-nineteenth-century railroading, Nashville, Tennessee’s capital by
the Cumberland. It was the great Louisville and Nashville Railroad, most
prominently among several, that not only took over so-called mid-South
agricultural transport but hauled ore to Birmingham’s mills and carried
iron and steel out. It was the rise of these and similar interior railroad
cities that accounted for the decline of such old cotton ports as Charleston,