History Day of Fun at Tannehill

I put on my historians hat yesterday and went out to Tannehill State Park. There are a lot of cabins from the early 1800s out there and a civil war iron smelter. I never took Alabama history in high school so I feel that I learned a lot yesterday. Tannehill was used by the Confederate troops during the civil war to produce all the iron needed by the army, at one point producing 20 tons of pig iron a day. Perhaps it is a carry over from my internship at Vulcan but I find iron smelting very interesting. I surprised my students last year when I went into a 10 minute lecture on how iron is produced and how that affected the growth of Birmingham. I think that I also find iron smelting so interesting because it was so intrigral to how the city I currently live in grew. If we didn't have the three main ingredients for iron so readily available Birmingham would still be a small farming town in the middle of Alabama and not the biggest city in the state. I also learned that the University of Alabama was burned down during the Civil War, the Union troops felt that the University was a key institution in the Confederate war effort. I had never heard that so I learned something new.

I also stared reading The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet today. So far I really like it. It is a book for all you history nerds out there. It is about a 12-year-old cartographer who gets hired by the Smithsonian to be a lecturer. So anyways read it if you are a nerd like me.