Battelle

Timeline

• 1900-1902 - Founding and Discovery Colonel John Gordon Battelle, heading the Lookout Mountain Iron Company, discovered promising deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone at the foot of Lookout Mountain. The company quickly established a mining operation and began building an entire community to support it.
• 1902-1905 - Boom Years Battelle rapidly grew into a fully-equipped company town featuring hundreds of houses, a two-story school, a commissary, a post office, a church, a large store, company offices, and two hotels for white residents plus one for Black residents. The town had its own water system pumping spring water directly into homes. The industrial complex included a blast furnace and 150 beehive-style coke ovens for producing the coke needed to smelt iron ore.
• 1905 - Decline and Abandonment Just five years after its founding, Battelle's mineral deposits were found to be of insufficient quality and quantity to compete with the established mining operations in Birmingham. The furnace was placed on standby, and residents began leaving in droves. By the end of 1905, the town was essentially abandoned.
• 1906-1918 - Liquidation and Dismantling The liquidation of Battelle's assets began in November 1906. During World War I, the blast furnace was sold to the British government, dismantled, and shipped to Calcutta, India, where it presumably continued producing iron for the war effort.
• 1940s - Brief Revival The Belcher Lumber Company of Centerville briefly operated in the area during the 1940s, giving the ghost town a temporary second life as a timber operation. This activity did little to restore the former mining community.
• 1969 - Train Disaster In 1969, a train derailment involving propane tanks at the Battelle site made news, briefly bringing the forgotten ghost town's name back into public consciousness.