A native of Brunswick County, Virginia, Mr. Powell, while yet a beardless youth, had ridden the distance from Virginia to Alabama on horseback. This was before Alabama had emerged into statehood. On his faithful horse he reached the straggling village of Montgomery with less than twenty dollars in his pockets. Entering on life in the new region to which he had come, as a mail contractor, he gradually rose to the direction of a line of stage coaches for the transportation of mail and passengers, and with a widening horizon of business tact and comprehensiveness of enterprise for which he was remarkable, he adjusted his stage coach enterprise to a chain of hotels, the most noted of which were located at Montgomery, Lowndesboro and Wetumpka. These interests flourished as the people continued to pour into the new state. As the forests were transmuted into smiling fields, villages, and towns began to emerge into populous centers, and institutions began to flourish. While Powell was instrumental in making new conditions, the conditions were making Powell. A man grows by the means which he creates. While he makes a fortune the fortune makes him. Gifted with an enterprising and constructive mind, Mr. Powell was gradually coming to that stage for which his life was fitting him. The combination of conditions which followed in the wake of the turbulence of years, was one which would arrest the enterprising eye of a man of executive skill, and breadth of vision, which James R. Powell had. Two unfinished lines of railway penetrated the state, in part, one reaching from the Gulf northward, but checked by mountain barriers, the other stretching from the fertile West southward, but halting before the mountains, beyond which was the line with which it was destined to be linked in the creation of one of the greatest arteries of commerce in the South. Between the two, lay a wide barrier of mountain region, in which were embosomed untouched treasures which were destined in their development to excite the interest of the world. With these resources was associated in the fertile brain of James R. Powell, the picture of a mineral metropolis in the mountains of north Alabama, and in a region where men least dreamed of such a possible creation. He had engineered primitive mail routes, first on horseback, and later by the rumbling coach, and widening the expansion of interest and effort by the establishment of timely hostelries, but here he was destined to crown his unusual career as the builder of a mighty city. Hence, Birmingham.