Hillman

The Influence of Christ in Modern Life (1900),
Building a Working Faith (1903), The Quest
of John Chapman (1904), The Contagion of
Character (1911)* The Story of Phaedrus
(1914), Studies of the Great War (1915), Great
Men as Prophets of a New Era (1922). He also
edited The Message of David Swing to His Gen-
eration (1913), and Lectures and Orations by
Henry Ward Beecher (1913). In 1930 After
Sermon Prayers of Newell Dwight Hillis was
published.

[M. M. Hester, Hist, and Geneal. of the Descendants
of John Lawrence Hester and Godfrey Stough (1905) ;
Brooklyn Eagle, N. Y. Times, and N. Y. Herald Trib-
une, Feb. 26, 1929; editorial in the Congregationalist,
Mar. 7, 1929; H. D. McKeehan, Anglo-American
Preaching (1928) ; Who's Who in America, 1928-29.]

E.D.E.

HILLMAN, THOMAS TENNESSEE (Feb.
2, i844-Aug. 4, 1905), industrialist, one of the
Tennesseeans who invaded the new Birming-
ham industrial district and left an indelible im-
pression upon the new Alabama, was the son of
Daniel and Ann (Marable) Hillman, and was
born in Montgomery County, Tenn. Both his
father and his grandfather, descendants of a
long line of Dutch ironmasters, 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 fur-
nace in Lyon County, Ky. 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. At
fifteen he 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. Upon leaving school
he joined his father's Empire Coal Company in
Trigg County, Ky. This concern made bar and
sheet iron which supplied about eighty per cent
of the Southern field. Between the years 1853
and 1862 the firm is said to have cleared $i,-
300,000.

During the Civil War young Hillman man-
aged 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. On July 25, 1867, he mar-
ried Emily S. Gentry of Nashville. They had
no children. In 1879 Hillman entered the mer-
cantile field in Nashville, but within a year that
inspiring genius of the new Birmingham dis-
trict, H. F. De Bardeleben [q.v.], had interested

Hillyer

him again in iron making. He removed to Bir-
mingham and in association with De Bardeleben
built the Alice Furnace No. i, which began oper-
ation Nov. 30, 1880, the first iron furnace to be
built in the city proper. Hillman was made pres-
ident 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 com-
bination of interests under the leadership of
Enoch Ensley of Memphis, the corporation be-
ing 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 Tennes-
see Company became the largest interest in the
region and some twenty years later was absorbed
by the United States Steel Corporation (No-
vember 1907).

Hillman, in 1904, with G. B. and H. E. Mc-
Cormack, Erskine Ramsay, and others, formed
the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company, consist-
ing 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 Bir-
mingham Railway, Light & Power Company, a
director of the First National Bank of Birming-
ham, and president of the Ensley Railway Com-
pany (electric). For him were named the Hill-
man Hospital (a county institution) and the
Hillman Hotel of Birmingham. He died in At-
lantic City, N. J., in the summer of 1905, at the
age of sixty-one.

[T. M. Owen, Hist, of Ala. and Diet, of Ala. Biog.
(1921), vol. Ill; Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and
Iron in Ala. (1910) ; G. M. Cruikshank, Hist, of Bir-
mingham and Its Environs (1920) ; Memorial Record
of Ala. (1893), vol. II; Birmingham Age-Herald f Aug.
5, 1905; Nashville Banner, Aug. 7, 1905.] H. A.T.

HILLYER, JUNIUS (Apr. 23, i8o7-June 21,
1886), lawyer, congressman, was born in Wilkes
County, Ga., the son of Shaler and Rebecca
(Freeman) Hillyer. His paternal grandfather,
Asa, was a native of Connecticut and served in
the Revolutionary War; his maternal grand-
father, John Freeman, was a Revolutionary sol-
dier in Georgia. When Junius was fourteen
years old his father died and his mother removed
to Athens, the seat of the University of Georgia,
to educate her three sons. Junius received his

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