POWERGRAMS

In the 19th century, Alabama was an agricultural state with cotton the commercial crop. On the eve of the Civil War, Daniel Pratt's cotton gin factory north of Montgomery was the state's most successful manufacturing entity, and there were scattered textile mills in the Tennessee Valley, at Tuscaloosa and Tallassee. Commercial conventions of the day advocated for more industry, while the state's numerous creeks, streams and rivers provided falling water for motive power. The possibilities of profits from the mineral district of northern Alabama were known – Pratt had invested there early – but financing for industry and manufacturing lagged before 1865. After the war, capital in manufacturing in Alabama rose from $5.7 million in 1870 to $70 million in 1900 and a decade later had risen to $173 million. But the jump in capital invested in manufacturing in Alabama just six years after Alabama Power built and put into operation its first hydroelectric dam in 1914 was astounding – $456 million in 1920. It is true that this nationwide economic boom began as World War I stimulated economic development, but Alabama was ready to provide the electricity needed to continue it into the Jazz Age. The first generation of electricity in Alabama occurred in 1882 to light the streets of a mill village outside of Anniston. The early growth and spread of electricity was almost totally confined to cities with generation by coal-fired steam. The larger cities – Birmingham, Mobile and Montgomery – had coal-generated electricity, and in addition, Montgomery had high-voltage wires bringing some hydroelectricity from a small dam on the Tallapoosa River near Tallassee. Although Coosa River steamboat captain William Patrick Lay had experimented with the production of electricity generated by falling water turning a turbine, he was never able to find capitalists with confidence in the technology and a trust in the demand to invest in such a costly dream as hydroelectric dams. In 1884, the mineral district in the area around the New South city of Birmingham was enjoying "the Great Iron Boom" only 13 years after its founding. Potential was there but more capital was needed. The key to increased investments in power development was to increase demand. In 1911, when a Massachusetts engineer operating out of London appeared at the door of Tom Martin's Montgomery law firm, the economic opportunities in Alabama were about to escalate. The problem had been a merry-go-round of factories and industry needing electricity to run their motors and plants, and power dreamers needing the insurance of adequate demand for electricity from industry that could provide returns enabling them to pay back their loans that could finance the development. Who would take the daring gamble first? As it turned out, it was a self-taught engineer of Scottish descent, an expert in electric motors that ran street railways, who came to Alabama and changed the economic development scene. When James Mitchell visited the South in the fall of 1911, he heard about the dam site on the Tallapoosa River at Cherokee Bluffs near Dadeville, and he went to see it. Mitchell left convinced that he could build a dam there and produce electricity cheaper than any place he had ever seen. Mitchell had visited Asia and Russia, and worked in South America building hydroelectric dams and running street railway systems. Of all the men he might have met on his visit to Alabama in 1911, that he was told to go see lawyer Martin in Montgomery was fortuitous indeed for both men – and for the state of Alabama and its people. Although in the ensuing years, Martin lived comfortably, he was never wealthy, perhaps because he was driven more by an almost missionary zeal to bring Alabama out of the dark, into the lights of electricity and to improve the lives of his state's citizens. Mitchell acquired British capital to build the first dam, a reserve coal- fired steam plant, transmission and distribution lines, and substations. The Lock 12 (Lay) Dam on the Coosa River was producing electricity early in 1914. Mitchell used the Baltimore-based Manufacturers Record, even before the dam was generating electricity, to advertise the inexpensive electricity soon to be available in Alabama. Industrial motors were essential to make Mitchell's investments profitable. The beginning of World War I was difficult and stressful for the company, as investment capital from England grew scarce. German U-boat attacks on passenger liners and ships carrying freight and food to England, and military setbacks along the French front and elsewhere, threatened the English worldwide empire. In Alabama, Mitchell and Martin were two driven men for whom the words "no" and "failure" were not part of their DNA. That concept, their ultimate determination to find a way to succeed, is one of the more important legacies these leaders left Alabama Power Company. A second legacy was their understanding of the significance of economic development to Alabama Power's success. Commitment to economic development, recruitment of new industries, and investments in communities and human resources were core principles of Alabama Power from the very beginning. The company prospered as its state and people did. by Leah Rawls Atkins HISTORY Mitchell 41

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