Long before Blount Springs was a place people swam or bought a lake-view lot, it was a place people worked a quarry. The same rock face the Sloss family used to rebuild the resort hotel in 1887 had its own separate, purely industrial life - one that still leaves a real, physical mark on the ground today.
In January 1884, a stock company with $10,000 in capital began building two iron kilns in the quarry on the mountainside, sited deliberately near the depot for shipping - the notice didn’t name the company. By that September, a barrel factory was under construction for packaging finished quicklime under the name Jackson Lime Company - almost certainly the same venture, though the identification is an inference, not a confirmed fact. The two kilns still stand today, visible from Highway 31 - a real, physical answer to a question locals have long wondered about without ever quite pinning down.
A dedicated rock train ran lime-rock from the quarry to the furnaces in Birmingham, and the work came at a real, human cost. Conductor Bascom Doak was killed when a rock train hit a washout during an unprecedented April 1884 storm that also damaged roads, bridges, and culverts across the district. A year and a half later, on his first trip on the job, brakeman D. N. Paulding was crushed re-coupling cars after a lime train collided with the rear of a Louisville and Nashville through freight in November 1885.
An 1885 report from Alabama’s state convict inspectors lists Blount Springs alongside Pratt Mines and a plantation, describing convicts at Blount Springs as “well fed, clothed, and are in good health.” The same quarry is separately documented, in a first-person 1913 newspaper account of the resort’s history, as having “brought in many new people, both black and white” once the Slosses took it over. Convict leasing - the state practice of leasing prisoners to private companies for labor - was common in Alabama quarry and mining operations of this era.
Related: Blount Springs, the resort itself, and Col. J.F.B. Jackson: The Man Behind the Jackson House, on the ownership chain that ran the property alongside this quarry.
Sources: Memphis Daily Appeal, various issues 1884-1885 (lime-kiln notice, January 8, 1884; Jackson Lime Company notice, September 18, 1884; rock-train wreck, dated “Birmingham, April 15” per the clipping, 1884; lime-train collision, November 29, 1885); and a contemporary report of Alabama’s state convict inspectors, 1885, source paper not given on the clipping in hand.
