Discreet 24/7 Biohazard Remediation in Shelby, AL

Shelby is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Shelby County, Alabama, near Lay Lake and Waxahatchee Creek, and Shelby Iron Park sits at the heart of the community.

Shelby grew up around the Shelby Iron Company works, Alabama's first permanent ironworks, established by Massachusetts-born industrialist Horace Ware, who bought the land in December 1842 and completed a 30-foot brick-and-stone blast furnace later in the 1840s.

In 1858, Ware added Alabama's first rolling mill at Shelby, which on April 11, 1860, produced the first finished bar iron made in the state.

At its height, the Shelby furnace was known as 'the Queen of American Charcoal Iron' and was the largest charcoal-fired iron furnace in the United States.

During the Civil War, iron plating from the Shelby works was used on the Confederate ironclads CSS Tennessee, CSS Huntsville, and CSS Tuscaloosa.

A detachment of Wilson's Raiders destroyed the Shelby ironworks on March 31, 1865, in the closing weeks of the Civil War, but the furnace was rebuilt by 1869, and the works remained the longest-operating charcoal furnace of its kind in the country until it shut down in 1923.

Shelby appeared in the 1880 census as 'Shelby Iron Works' and in the 1890 census as an incorporated town, then did not appear again as a separately returned community until it was listed as a census-designated place in the 2010 census, 120 years later.

At the 2020 census, Shelby had a population of 940.

Historic Shelby Iron Works Park preserves the furnace site, with a museum, an 1870s-era sawmill, a grist mill, a blacksmith shop, and two annual Shelby Iron Works festivals.

Two Shelby landmarks, the Brick House and the Old Shelby Hotel, are listed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage.