Background
Samuel Noble was born on November 22, 1834 in Cornwall, England. He was the son of James Noble and Jenifer Ward Noble.
Samuel Noble was born on November 22, 1834 in Cornwall, England. He was the son of James Noble and Jenifer Ward Noble.
The family emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1837 and at Reading Samuel received an elementary education. More important, however, was the early training in ironmaking from his father; he was brought up in the atmosphere of the furnace and forge.
Samuel became the leading spirit of the firm of James Noble & Sons, whose plant consisted of a rolling-mill, foundry, and nailery in Rome, and a furnace in Cherokee County, Alabama. Their business prospered and they expanded it to meet the needs of the Confederacy by building Cornwall Furnace in the same county to provide more iron for war materials. Both the furnace and the factory at Rome were destroyed by the Federal forces in 1864.
Successful in enlisting capital from the North, he soon rebuilt the works at Rome. Meanwhile he was in search of larger ore deposits in the hill country of northeastern Alabama. After prospecting near Oxford he secured financial aid in New York with which to buy in Calhoun County extensive brown-ore properties and a large acreage of yellow pine for charcoal.
On a visit to Charleston, South Carolina, he chanced to meet General Daniel Tyler, a northern capitalist, who was so impressed by the young man's enthusiasm that he explored the ore fields in company with Noble. The result was the formation of the Woodstock Iron Company in 1872 with General Tyler's son Alfred as president and Samuel Noble as secretary-treasurer and general manager. In April 1873 their charcoal blast furnace No. 1, of forty-ton capacity, was blown in and ran almost continuously for twenty years. It produced a high quality of car-wheel iron which found a ready market in the North. The steady demand for this iron enabled the company to survive the panic and depression of the mid-seventies, to construct furnace No. 2 in 1879, and to enlarge No. 1 the following year. Meanwhile the town of Woodstock had been organized in July 1873 as Anniston, named for the wife of General Tyler. Samuel Noble, dynamic spirit of the enterprise, with visions of the "model city of the South" (as it was later advertised), directed the policy of the company in laying out streets and parks, erecting schools, and providing lots for churches of every denomination. When the first boom of the eighties appeared, Anniston grew by leaps and bounds.
During the period 1880-85 Noble and his associates organized the Clifton Iron Company at Ironaton where they built two forty-ton charcoal furnaces and enlarged an older one, the Jenifer. In Anniston a cotton-mill with 12, 000 spindles was erected and the car-wheel works of Noble Brothers was moved thither from Rome. In 1883 the Woodstock Company, which had retained possession of all property, formally opened the city to the public and encouraged new industries. Noble, always a progressive ironmaster, acquired valuable coal properties and constructed two two-hundred-ton coke furnaces to make pig iron for the manufacture of cast-iron pipe, a pioneer enterprise embodied in the Anniston Pipe Works Company, organized in 1887. That the progress of Anniston, social as well as economic, was always Noble's primary consideration, was evidenced in the schools, the Anniston Inn, and the first newspaper--the Weekly Hot Blast--which he founded.
People of every sect and worthy cause were recipients of his gifts, and his employees, both white and colored, were devoted to him.
At the height of his achievements, when Anniston's industrial capital represented an investment of more than eleven million dollars, he died suddenly.
Noble built the Episcopal church, of which he was the leading member.
Convinced that the southern iron industry needed a protective tariff, Noble consistently supported the Republican party.
In 1861 Noble married Christine Stoeckel of Philadelphia, by whom he had one son and three daughters.
