Lists of the names most associated with Alabama’s early coal and iron industry — DeBardeleben, Sloss, Pratt or Aldrich, for instance — often exclude the enterprising William Phineas Browne. Though he lacked the capital or reach of his successors, Browne enjoyed steady success during nearly four decades as an Alabama businessman. In the process, the New Englander wrote his name into the history books.
Browne was born in Vermont in 1804. His father was a Revolutionary War veteran, his mother a descendant of William Bradford, first governor of the Plymouth Colony. After a stint as a bookkeeper at a New York City firm, he returned home to study law, passing the bar in 1829.
In 1831, he arrived in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, having followed a cousin to work on the business side of the expansive canal project. Chasing a larger contract, the cousins soon relocated to New Orleans. Browne quickly lost his taste for the work, compounded by lingering effects of a malarial fever, which plagued him most of his days. He entered into a partnership to conduct daily freight and mail runs between New Orleans and Mobile. For a time, Browne captained the steamer himself.
In Mobile, the young striver invested well. He enjoyed a fruitful business relationship with fellow Vermont transplant Henry Hitchcock, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. From Hitchcock, Browne purchased a fine downtown Mobile hotel. The pair were co-owners of a group of tenement houses and several businesses. Browne lived well during these years, but the global financial panic of 1837, followed two years later by Hitchcock’s death, wiped out much of his early fortune.
Undaunted, Browne soon returned to the business realm, opening a small and profitable corn mill near Mobile. Perhaps because of his associations with Hitchcock, he also entered the public arena. In 1845, he won a seat in the Alabama Legislature. While attending the session in Tuscaloosa, which served as Alabama’s capital from 1826 until 1846, Browne met Margaret Stevens. The couple wed in August 1846 and had seven children. Margaret would be a true partner in her husband’s subsequent business ventures.
Marriage brought Browne to central Alabama, where he acquired acreage in both Shelby and Bibb counties. He was joined in these purchases by investor and businessman Phillip J. Weaver, a longtime partner. These properties lay within what we know today as the rich Cahaba coal fields. In an attempt to make the most of the purchase, Browne worked to influence the route of a railroad through the area, in hopes he could construct a branch line to his coalmine and other properties.
As Browne waited on the railroad, he established one of Alabama’s earliest iron-making businesses. The site lay along the banks of the Little Cahaba River in adjacent Bibb County. A state geologist who surveyed the site predicted there was enough ore therein “to run a hundred furnaces a hundred years.” Buoyed by such a prediction, an enthusiastic Browne christened the site his “Brighthope.” Near the banks of the river, he erected a small conical furnace made of sandstone in 1848. A second, higher stack came later.
Still impatient to sell his coal, Browne forsook the railroad’s timeline for arrival and commenced operations in 1851. Assisted by two enslaved workers, Browne mined wagonloads of coal from the site and sent it by barge to Selma, where business partner George Baker sold it for $4.50 per ton. It took two more years for the Alabama & Tennessee River Railroad to make its way to Montevallo, allowing Browne to build his own connecting branch line.
The business flourished. By 1856, enslaved workers were mining some five tons of coal each day. Browne’s largest single contract of the 1850s was for 1,000 tons sold to the Montgomery Gas and Light Co. “Don’t you wish we could fill them all!” crowed George Baker from the Selma office. “My mouth waters to do it!”
As the 1860s arrived, war quickly changed the business plan. With most river routes closed to civilian barge traffic, he expended great effort convincing Confederate authorities to purchase his coal. Long weeks in Richmond kept him away from a languishing business and his ailing wife. In October 1862, the same month Browne finally secured a 4,000-ton contract with the Confederate Navy, Margaret died of a “bilious fever.” The couple’s infant daughter, Elizabeth, died the following year. Business decisions Browne made during this season of personal woe later served to compound his financial ruin. Like many Southern businessmen, he was heavily invested in soon-to-be worthless Confederate bonds. In the spring of 1865, Browne’s central Alabama properties fell victim to the Union Army, as General James Wilson and his forces cut their way through Alabama, destroying every coalmine and iron-making facility they found along the way. In letters to his family, Browne estimated his wartime business losses at $250,000.
In war’s wake, 61-year-old Browne tried to begin again, for arguably the third time in his life. He contracted with the Freedmen’s Bureau to hire several formerly enslaved men for his coalmine. He launched a sawmill near Mobile on a parcel of land given to him in payment of a debt. And he renewed his business interests in Selma. Browne divided time between Mobile, Montevallo and Selma. The frenetic work took its toll. “If I will but live a few more years, I can secure my children’s education,” he confided to a friend in 1866. “But I can never hope to be well off again, as age is beginning to tell on my energy.” Browne died at the Talladega home of his eldest son on January 13, 1869.
Over the generations, nature has reclaimed the ruins of Brighthope and Browne’s nearby coalmine, most of which now sits within the Cahaba National Wildlife Refuge. While other coal and iron men who followed him are perhaps better known, the untiring Browne ranks among the first to foresee the possibilities that lay inside the rich Alabama earth.
Historian Scotty E. Kirkland is a freelance contributor to Business Alabama. He lives in Wetumpka.
This article appears in the September 2026 issue of Business Alabama.
