The Model City of the New South

Book excerpt: A fascinating story of the collaborative efforts of an Englishman and a Connecticut Yankee to develop the iron resources of northeast Alabama Anniston"s early years constitute a fascinating story of the collaborative efforts of an Englishman and a Connecticut Yankee to develop the iron resources of northeast Alabama at a time when the area was struggling to recover from the devastating effects of the Civil War. The result was a robust, successful new town that benefited from their profit-minded business acumen and from their paternalistic but utopian mind-set. With town-building and boosting efforts, Anniston soon became known to contemporaries as "the model city of the New South." The town's economic survival through booms and busts is a study in marketing and diversification, of reliance on old liaisons in hard times. Originally published in 1978 and now reprinted in a paperbound edition with a new preface, the book explores Anniston's first quarter century and yields rich material because it cuts across several historical fields, including urban, economic, quantitative, social, and political history, as well as labor and race relations