The time an entire Alabama town was auctioned to the highest bidder

Throughout the 20th century, Alabama was filled with “company towns,” villages owned by mining and mill corporations. The villages had a company store, a school, churches and homes for employees and their families.

One such village was Holt, a Central Iron and Coal Co. town on the banks of the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa County.

Click through the gallery at the top of the story for more photos of Holt and the auction.

After the company folded, the town of Holt was sold at auction, bringing $103,000 in February of 1941. Today, Holt still exists as an unincorporated community and it is not privately owned.

The foundry

In 1905, Central Iron & Coal Company began operating a blast furnace, coke ovens, a by-products plant and a pipe foundry on the site of Holt, which was named for Frank Holt, one of the company’s officers. The Central foundry was used to manufacture cast iron pipe for water and gas service, cast-iron soil pipe, fittings used for plumbing and drain purposes, and brake shoes for railroad locomotives and cars, according to the Tuscaloosa Area Virtual Museum.

“At one time, the plant on the banks of the Black Warrior River was the largest cast-iron pipe maker in the world,” the entry said. “It survived the Great Depression and boomed during WWII and the Korean War. In the early 1980s, the foundry closed due to bankruptcy.”

The auction

In early 1941, newspapers across the state published stories about the company town going on auction on Feb. 4. It was unusual for an entire town to be for sale.

The village of Holt was formed in 1902 when Central Coal & Iron began operations.

“The village here was to house the workers and their families. But the firm went into receivership a number of years ago and under a Federal Court order,” said a Feb. 5 article in the Birmingham News.

The sale included 379 homes on 777.9 acres but did not include churches, a school, the foundry company’s commissary and office building. The foundry and other buildings had been purchased by DeBardelaben Coal Corp. Operations and continued there under various ownership until 1984.

As many as 1,500 people lived in the homes at the time of the auction, according to an article in the Montgomery Advertiser.

It was 11 months before the U.S. would enter World War II and rumors had been flying before the auction that the town “might be bought as a home for Jewish refugees,” the Advertiser article said.

Instead, on the day of the auction, there was a bidding war between two men, one from Birmingham and one from Massachusetts, as more than 70 spectators looked on. Aaron Krock, a businessman from Worchester, Mass., started the bidding at $100,000. William H. Hulsey of Birmingham had raised the stakes to $102,000 when Krock asked the auctioneer: “Does it include the two mules and wagon?” After being told the sale included the mules and wagon, Krock upped his bid to $102,100. After another round of bidding, Hulsey submitted the final winning bid of $103,000.

The auction took place on the steps of the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse. Following the sale, Hulsey told a Birmingham News reporter he wasn’t sure what he would do with the property. “I suppose I’ll rent part of it out and sell part of it,” he said.

Residents had been paying between $7 and $35 per month in rent on the company homes and hoped to continue.

Holt today

Holt is not incorporated but it is a census-designated place, meaning the U.S. Census Bureau uses statistical data from the area. In 2020, 3,413 people lived in the community.

Several streets are still dotted with the small company houses and a few industrial buildings still remain on the banks of the Black Warrior River.

Holt High School also remains in a building constructed in 2018. The school mascot is the Ironmen, which refers to the foundry workers who founded the village.

The first school was built by Central Iron & Coal and had its first graduating class in 1910. That school burned in 1941, the same year as the auction, and has been rebuilt three times.