To this day, Emily Copeland and her husband, James, have no idea when their son was born. They know the year, of course, and the day, and the hour. After that, it gets a little fuzzy. There were a few too many things going on that May morning in 2006 when Matthew decided he wasn’t going to wait to full-term to make his debut—much less make it to the hospital.
Emily, who has worked at UAB for five years, got up that morning expecting to visit her obstetrician, but just for a routine visit. “My pregnancy was pretty much normal up until 28 weeks,” Emily says. “But the night before I had Matthew, I started feeling a little bit of discomfort. And I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got an appointment in the morning. I’ll just tell my doctor at 8:45. I can make it until then.’” Emily was due August 1—almost three months later—“and we really thought we had our stuff together,” she says. “We were getting his nursery ready. I had no clue.”
For nearly 90 years, Sloss Furnaces helped fuel Birmingham’s booming growth, drawing hundreds of families to live and work in the shadow of the massive iron plant. Today Sloss curator—and UAB history instructor—Karen Utz is learning about this vanished way of life and sharing it with her students. In the process, she is shedding new light on a key, but often overlooked, era in the city’s past.
In this slideshow, Utz describes how she uses oral histories and even recipes to preserve the stories of Birmingham ironworkers.
