The Alabama town living and dying in the shadow of chemical plants

The first two chemical companies - Olin Corporation and Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corporation - arrived in the McIntosh area in the early 1950s, attracted by the town’s proximity to a large natural salt dome and transport routes and the prospect of cheap labour from the nearby communities. Most residents can trace their ancestry to the Lang and Reed families, who owned land in the area as far back as the Reconstruction era, from 1865 to 1877 when the South was rebuilt after the Civil War and the Southern Homestead Act allowed formerly enslaved people to own land. Representatives of Olin and those of a white local congressman named Frank Boykin would come by, urging them to sell their land. Cliff Ware says he has waited for years to share the story of how Olin bought his great-grandparents’ riverfront land for “little or nothing” in the 1950s.