SYLACAUGA, Ala. – This week in March 1891, investors were talking about and preparing for a sale of business and residential land lots in Sylacauga set for Thursday, April 9.
A 126-year-old brochure prepared by a Pittsburgh firm bragged that “money would surely grow” in Sylacauga, population 1,500, a town “surrounded by limitless mineral, timber, and agricultural riches”. It was “the grandest opportunity ever offered investors”, and the pitch highlighted iron, cotton, marble, agriculture, timber, slate, fireclay, and “proximity to markets”.
Billed as “The Marble City”, Sylacauga was praised as “the very heart of the largest and purest Brown Ore Belt on earth” and home of “the finest White, Varigator, and Black Marble on the continent”, with “Marble enough under every lot to build a block”, “Slate enough within a radius of ten miles to supply the schools of the globe, roof the State of Alabama, and then leave more Slate than there is in Wales”, and “Granite enough within twenty miles to build a Chinese Wall opening the Quarries”.
Sylacauga, the company concluded, was “the Centre of the Richest Section of the New South and as undeveloped as Alaska” with “as kindly a people as ever graced the earth”.
Intrigued? Take a closer look at the brochure!
Lee Perryman for SylacaugaNews.com | © 2017, SylacaugaNews.com/Marble City Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
