Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/806

 788 MONTGOMERY this point by steamers at all seasons, and four lines of railroad furnish means of communica- tion with all sections of the state, viz. : the Mobile and Montgomery; Montgomery and Eufaula; South and North Alabama; and Western of Alabama. The city is the point of supply and shipment of a large and fertile cot- ton region. Its trade in groceries is impor- tant, and its receipts of cotton are large. The entire trade amounts to nearly $10,000,000 a year. The chief manufacturing establishments are an iron foundery and a flouring mill. There are two national banks, with a joint capital of $425,000, and three private banking houses. The state house, which occupies an elevated situation on Capitol hill, was erected in 1851 at a cost of $75,000, the original capi- tol having been destroyed by fire in 1849. The dome commands a fine view of the city and adjacent country. Among other public State Capitol, Montgomery. buildings are the court house, a fine city hall containing a market and rooms for the fire de- partment, and the theatre. The city is lighted with gas, and supplied with water by artesian wells and water works (from the river) of sufficient capacity to keep in reservoir three months 1 supply for 25,000 people. The public schools are attended by about 300 white and 500 colored children, and there are several pri- vate schools, with a large attendance. Three daily newspapers (issuing also weekly editions) and a weekly agricultural journal are published. There are 14 churches, viz. : 4 Baptist (2 colored), 1 Episcopal, 1 Jewish, 5 Methodist (2 colored and 1 Northern), 1 Presbyterian, 1 Protestant Methodist, and 1 Roman Catho- lic. Montgomery was laid out in 1817, and the seat of government was removed to it from Tuscaloosa in 1847. It was the seat of the confederate government from Feb. 4, 1861, to the following May, when it was removed to Richmond. The city was evacuated by the confederates April 11, 1865, after burning 80,- 000 bales of cotton, and on the following day it was occupied by the federal forces under Gen. Wilson, when the arsenal, railroad depots, and foundery were destroyed. MONTGOMERY, James, a British poet, born in Irvine, Ayrshire, Nov. 4, 1771, died near Shef- field, April 30, 1854. His father was a Mora- vian preacher, and James, being intended for the same office, was sent in his seventh year to a Moravian settlement at Fulneck, near Leeds, to complete his education. Here he remained ten years, distinguished only for indolence and melancholy. The brethren at Fulneck then apprenticed him to a grocer in Mirfield. Be- fore the age of 14 he had written a mock he- roic poem of 1,000 lines, and had commenced an epic to be called " The World." He ran away in June, 1789, but after many wanderings engaged again as shop boy in Wath, a village of Yorkshire. A year later he sent a volume of manuscript poetry to Mr. Harrison, a Lon- don publisher, and soon after went to London himself. Harrison re- fused his poems, but en- gaged him as his shop- man. Toward the end of 1792 he became clerk to Joseph Gales, editor and publisher of the "Sheffield Regis- ter," a newspaper of revolutionary tenden- cies. Gales fled to America to avoid ar- rest for treason, and Montgomery started a new weekly journal called the "Sheffield Iris," advocating peace and reform principles. The first number ap- peared July 4, 1794, and he edited it till Sept. 27, 1825. Almost immediately after the first appearance of the " Iris," he was fined 20, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment, for printing a doggerel ballad on " The Fall of the Bastile" for a poor hawker. Again in 1796 he was found guilty of sedition, fined 30, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, for publishing in his newspaper an account of a riot in Sheffield. He was confined in York castle, where he wrote a small volume of poems entitled "Prison Amusements," published in 1797. His gentle yet earnest character, and his literary ability, gradually won him the re- gard of his political opponents, and he began to take a high rank as a sacred poet. In 1806 he published " The Wanderer of Switzerland," in 1810 " The West Indies " and " Greenland," and in 1812 "The World before the Flood," which attained great popularity. In 1835 a