Thomas Tennessee Hillman was an American industrialist and prominent businessman of Birmingham, Alabama. He was at one time vice-president of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railway Company, and later was connected with the Birmingham Coal and Iron Fields.
Background
Thomas Tennessee Hillman was born on February 2, 1844 in Montgomery County, Tennessee, United States. He was the son of Daniel and Ann (Marable) Hillman, and Both his father and his grandfather, descendants of a long line of Dutch iron masters, were practical iron men of New Jersey, who for many years made iron in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Thomas spent his early boyhood about his father's furnace in Lyon County, Kentucky. At the age of seven he was severely injured by a fall from a horse which made him an invalid for six years and from which accident he never fully recovered. He was a boy of ambition and pluck, however, and although his back was weak he insisted on going hunting like other boys, his father sending along slaves to carry him on their shoulders.
Education
At fifteen Hillman went to Louisville where he worked in a rolling-mill, returning home the next year to enter Vandusia Academy, near Nashville, where he remained for two years.
Career
Hillman joined his father's Empire Coal Company in Trigg County, Kentucky. This concern made bar and sheet iron which supplied about eighty per cent of the Southern field. Between the years 1855 and 1862 the firm is said to have cleared $1, 300, 000. During the Civil War young Hillman managed the Center and Empire furnaces. On his twenty-first birthday his father gave him a fifty-thousand-dollar interest in the company and made him manager.
In 1879 Hillman entered the mercantile field in Nashville, but within a year that inspiring genius of the new Birmingham district, H. F. De Bardeleben, had interested him again in iron making. He removed to Birmingham and in association with De Bardeleben built the Alice Furnace No. 1, which began operation November 30, 1880, the first iron furnace to be built in the city proper. Hillman was made president and general manager, the company being capitalized at a quarter of a million dollars. In 1883 Alice No. 2 ("Big Alice") was completed.
The following year Hillman entered the combination of interests under the leadership of Enoch Ensley of Memphis, the corporation being known as the Pratt Coal & Iron Company. Later Ensley's dominating personality and his habit of claiming credit for the success of the Alice furnaces caused Hillman to induce the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company to buy into the Pratt concern, thus forcing Ensley out of control (1886).
Hillman was made vice-president, and under his direction were built the four furnaces comprising the first unit of the Tennessee Company's new plant at Ensley, now a part of the greater Birmingham. The Tennessee Company became the largest interest in the region and some twenty years later was absorbed by the United States Steel Corporation (November 1907).
Hillman, in 1904, with G. B. and H. E. McCormack, Erskine Ramsay, and others, formed the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company, consisting of nine separate coal interests with fifty-four mines having a daily capacity of 12, 000 tons. He was president of this company at the time of his death. He was also a director of the Birmingham Railway, Light & Power Company, a director of the First National Bank of Birmingham, and president of the Ensley Railway Company (electric).
He died in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the summer of 1905, at the age of sixty-one.
Achievements
Religion
Hillman was a prominent member of the Methodist Church in Nashville.
Connections
On July 25, 1867, Hillman married Emily S. Gentry of Nashville. They had no children.