Bessemer, Alabama
Support: 17 5/8 × 14 3/8 in. (44.8 × 36.5 cm)
Frame: 19 1/2 × 16 3/4 × 3/4 in. (49.5 × 42.5 × 1.9 cm)
Text Entries
For other images Walker Evans made in the area around Birmingham, see “”Fish Market near Birmingham, Alabama” (2006.22.4) and “Boarding House Porch, Birmingham, Alabama” (2016.x.x) from this same portfolio and donor.
Bessemer is a city southwest of Birmingham, Alabama. By the 1920s, the region around Birmingham produced one-fourth of this country’s foundry iron and was the largest producer of steel in the Southeast. In 1886 iron and steel magnate Henry Fairfield DeBardeleben founded the City of Bessemer and the Bessemer Land and Improvement Company with the goal of creating a center for the steel industry. With $2 million in starting capital, he built several blast furnaces and the following year bought 4,000 acres of land, marking off blocks for a new town along the rail lines of the Alabama Great Southern Railway. Henry DeBardeleben believed that the town’s name should reflect an economy that was built on the iron ore and steel industry. He named the community “Bessemer” in honor of Sir Henry Bessemer who invented the open-hearth method of steel producing. In April of 1887 the first commercial lots were sold and the town of Bessemer began to grow. By the 1920s, Bessemer was the fourth largest city in Alabama. (source: City of Bessemer website http://www.bessemeral.org/history/, accessed February 2017).
After giving a lecture at Yale University in 1964, Evans began teaching there the following year as a professor of graphic design. He found a dynamic group of colleagues including Herbert Matter and Norman Seaton Ives. Ives worked with Evans to create a portfolio of his photographs issued in 1971, of which this photograph was a part (see object file for detailed publishing information and list of photographs included, all shot in the 1930s.