Charles Linn
Charles Linn (born Carl Eric Engelbrekt Sjödahl June 13, 1814 in Billnäs Bruk, Sweden; died August 5, 1882 in Birmingham) was a sailor, wholesaler, banker and industrialist.
Linn was the son of Erik Johan Sjödahl, chief inspector of the Billnäs Bruk, and his wife, Engla Gustava Collin. The lived near Pojo, on the southwestern coast of Finland, which was then a part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Young Carl displayed an early affinity for seafaring when, at age seven, he stowed away on a merchant vessel. When the crew discovered him, he was put to work as a cabin boy until he could be returned home.
At age thirteen, he was a pupil at the Imperial Academy in Turku when the city burned in a great fire. He took the opportunity to leave school and return to the sea as part of the crew of a merchant ship. Over the next dozen years he made the Atlantic crossing more than fifty times and completed three full circuits of the globe. In 1824 he left ship and settled as an immigrant in New York City. According to one account, he may have left a family behind in Helsinki.1.
Sjödahl adopted the name "Charles Linn" and took a job in a match factory, but it was not long before he desired to travel again and he found himself peddling goods from a pack, working his way South from New York to Alabama. He opened a mercantile store in Montgomery in 1838 and flourished in business there enough to purchase a farmstead. Finally ready to settle down, he voyaged home to Finland, marrying the former Emelie Antoinette Forss at Koskis on September 5, 1842. They had three children: Charles Washington, Antoinette Aurelia, and Edward. Emelie died in Montgomery from complications with Edward's birth on February 16, 1852.
He sold at the start of the Civil War and returned to the seas as a Captain in the Confederate Navy, charged with running ships laden with Southern cotton to Liverpool to raise war funds. His ship, The Kate Dale was boarded by Union troops in Havana harbor, and Linn and his son were captured. Taken to Washington D. C. they were quickly pardoned and Linn resumed the mercantile business with a wholesale grocery warehouse in New Orleans, importing dozens of his countrymen from Finland to work in his company.
Linn sold off his New Orleans business and retired to Montgomery, where a group of businessmen which included James Powell interested him in the idea of opening a bank in the newly-founded City of Birmingham. He agreed and launched the National Bank of Birmingham in 1872 with $50,000 in gold. In 1873 Linn was elected to the Birmingham Board of Aldermen under Mayor Powell.
Later that year, Linn erected the monumental 3-story National Bank of Birmingham building on the corner of 1st Avenue North and 20th Street at a time when the city's future was doubtful. The building became known as Linn's Folly, and it was there that Linn hosted the legendary New Year's Eve Calico Ball that signaled the city's emergence from a cholera epidemic.
In 1874 Linn created a small park in a half-block behind the Relay House.
Linn extended his investments from banking to industry, organizing two of the city's first such ventures, the Linn Iron Works and the Birmingham Car and Foundry Company with skilled workers brought in from Cleveland and Cincinnati. Linn purchased some of his equipment from the Confederate Iron Works in Selma.
Before his death in 1882 Linn issued a bold proclamation which was inscribed on his mortuary in Oak Hill Cemetery:
- I shall have my tomb built upon a high promontory above the town of Birmingham, in which you men profess to have so little faith, so that I may walk out on Judgment Day and view the greatest industrial city of the entire South.
Downtown's Linn Park was re-named for Linn in the 1980s. The Linn-Henley Research Library is also named in honor of Linn and his descendants. In 2005 Linn was inducted into the Birmingham Business Hall of Fame. In 2013 a statue of Linn, sculpted by Branko Medenica, was installed at Linn Park by the Alabama-Mississippi Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. The commission honored MS campaign chair Arthur Henley.
Notes
- Armor-2008
References
- Corley, Robert G. and Marvin Yeomans Whiting, editors (July 1979) Dedication. Journal of the Birmingham Historical Society. Vol. 6, No. 2
- Armor, John (August 2, 2008) "A Scandinavian Skeleton in a Southern Closet" FreeRepublic