1875

Mayor William H. Morris

1875 was the fourth year after the founding of the city of Birmingham.

Events

• January 4: William H. Morris succeeded James Powell as Mayor of Birmingham.
• May 1: The Colored Normal School at Huntsville opened.
• Christian Enslen, T. Y. Cain, J. A. Curry, J. W. Butler, Thomas Jeffers, Charles Linn, M. C. Wiley and George W. Allen took office as the Birmingham Board of Aldermen.
• Stillman College was authorized by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.

Business

Logotype used by the Shelby Iron Company in 1875

• September: Charlie Roberts became publisher of the Birmingham Iron Age.
• The 1875 Constitutional Convention met to create the 1875 Constitution of Alabama.
• Truman Aldrich purchased the Montevallo coal mines.
• Henry M. Caldwell succeeded James Powell as president of the Elyton Land Company.
• The Experimental Coke and Iron Company was organized by a committee of Birmingham investors, headed by Frank O'Brien, to establish the commercial viability of iron made from local resources.
• James Thomas and Company leased the Oxmoor Furnaces site.
• A new, 75-ton capacity furnace was completed at the Shelby Furnace.

Individuals

• June: Mary Gordon Duffee toured Mammoth Cave, Kentucky by arrangement of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad.
• John Altman relocated to Livingston.
• William Berney was promoted to cashier of the National Bank of Birmingham.
• John Phillips took a teaching position in Charleston, West Virginia.
• N. F. Thompson became the Southern agent for the Standard Oil Company.

Carrie Hill

Births

• January 20: C. I. Taylor, Birmingham Giants founder
• December 10: Alf Brown, Birmingham Fire Chief
• Carrie Hill, artist
• Patti Ruffner Jacobs, women's suffrage advocate

Graduations

• James Van Hoose from the University of the South.

Marriages

• Attorney A. O. Lane to his partner's daughter, Minnie Terry.

Ninian Tannehill

Deaths

• February 21: Zachariah Hagood, settler
• August 4: Williamson Hawkins, pioneer plantation owner
• October 10: Ninian Tannehill, ironworks owner
• Margaret Smith

Context

In 1875, Kwang-su became emperor of China. Bizet’s Carmen was first performed at the Opéra Comique, Paris. The first organized indoor game of ice hockey was played between in Montreal, Canada. Aristides won the first Kentucky Derby. Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to swim the English Channel. Brigham Young University was founded in Provo, Utah. The first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was given.

Notable books published in 1875 included Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott, Beauchamp's Career by George Meredith, and The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope . Notable music composed in 1875 included "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" by Thomas P. Westendorf, String Quartet No. 3 by Johannes Brahms, Serenade for Strings by Antonín Dvořák, and Piano Concerto No. 4 by Camille Saint-Saëns.

Notable births in 1875 included physician, philosopher, and musician Albert Schweitzer, film director D. W. Griffith, composer Maurice Ravel, automobile pioneer Walter Chrysler, boxer James J. Jeffries, pilot Harriet Quimby, automobile industrialist Alfred P. Sloan, writer Thomas Mann, psychiatrist Carl Jung, composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, author Edgar Rice Burroughs, occultist Aleister Crowley, chemist Gilbert N. Lewis, and military leader Arthur Currie. Notable deaths included painter Jean-François Millet, geologist Charles Lyell, the 12th Dalai Lama, composer Georges Bizet, sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, Confederate General George Pickett, former president Andrew Johnson, writer Hans Christian Andersen, writer Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, and golfer Young Tom Morris.

1870s

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