Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark

In 1983, twelve years after being blown out for the last time, Sloss Furnaces was designated a National Historic Landmark and opened to the public, declaring its mission to be a museum of industry and center for culture. Each year, more than 125,000 people people visit the Sloss museum and cultural park to learn about our industrial heritage, to picnic, to attend musical and dramatic performances and to sculpt iron or view iron sculptures.

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What is a National Historic Landmark?

Sloss Furnaces has the unique distinction of being the only publicly held industrial site in the world. Other communities in countries as far away as France have modeled their preservation efforts after those that have transformed Sloss Furnaces into the cultural center it is today.

A National Historic Landmark is a site where Americans can touch their own history. A National Historic Landmark situates time in space and thus gives us doors and windows into our national past. It may indicate either the place at which a significant historical event (such as a battle or the signing of a document) occurred, or a place where important individual Americans (presidents, for example) worked or lived or were born or died, or a place (a building or a battlefield) that provides information about our past or about the origins of the ideas that are most important to us as Americans. National Historic Landmarks allow us to approach in space what has gone beyond us in time. At National Historic Landmarks we can enter the penumbra of the past and feel it, and connect with that which has come before.

These landmarks get us as close to our history as we can come. They help us imagine the events that make our country what it is today. They instill within each of us a knowledge of the places or the persons or the events they commemorate, a knowledge we share, a knowledge that strengthens our bonds with one another as Americans. They connect us to our forefathers and foremothers, giving us imagined experiences that answer to their actual experiences. And they connect us to generations of Americans not yet born. They stand stronger than we stand, and wait for those future men and women who will come and learn as we do and then know something that we know, that our forebears knew. These National Historic Landmarks provide a lasting framework for the American Experience.

The Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark provides Alabamians with a site in which to mark the beginnings of industrialization in Alabama, and it provides Americans from every state with a place in which to visualize the process of iron-making that has been vital to our nation's economy for over a century.