Though the manufacturing industry maintains a strong presence in Birmingham, other businesses and industries such as banking, telecommunications, transportation, electrical power transmission, medical care, college education, and insurance have risen in stature. The economy diversified during the later half of the twentieth century. In the field of railroading, the two primary hubs of railroading in the Deep South were nearby Atlanta and Birmingham, beginning in the 1860s and continuing through to the present day.
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Much like Pittsburgh, Birmingham's major industries were iron and steel production, plus a major component of the railroading industry, where rails and railroad cars were both manufactured in Birmingham. The pace of Birmingham's growth during the period from 1881 through 1920 earned its nicknames The Magic City and The Pittsburgh of the South. įrom its founding through the end of the 1960s, Birmingham was a primary industrial center of the South. The city may have been planned as a place where cheap, non-unionized, and often African-American labor from rural Alabama could be employed in the city's steel mills and blast furnaces, giving it a competitive advantage over industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast. Most of the original settlers who founded Birmingham were of English ancestry. Birmingham was named for Birmingham, England one of that nation's major industrial cities. It grew from there, annexing many more of its smaller neighbors, into an industrial and railroad transportation center with a focus on mining, the iron and steel industry, and railroading.
Birmingham serves as an important regional hub and is associated with the Deep South, Piedmont, and Appalachian regions of the nation.īirmingham was founded in 1871, during the post- Civil War Reconstruction period, through the merger of three pre-existing farm towns, notably, former Elyton.
The broader Birmingham metropolitan area had a 2020 population of 1,115,289, and is the largest metropolitan area in Alabama as well as the 50th-most populous in the United States. As of 2020, Birmingham had a population of 200,733, making it Alabama's second-most populous city after Huntsville. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. Birmingham–Shuttlesworth International Airportīirmingham ( / ˈ b ɜːr m ɪ ŋ h æ m/ BUR-ming-ham) is a city in the north central region of the U.S.