Where the name comes from

Cahaba Studio is named for the place I grew up, and its logo is something you can still walk up to there.

The name

The Cahaba is a river in central Alabama. Its name is usually traced to the Choctaw words oka and aba, "water above"; another account ties it to a Creek word for the cane that grew along its banks.

In 1883 Truman Aldrich and Cornelius Cadle took the name for the Cahaba Coal Mining Company, which opened mines in Bibb County and built the company town of Blocton around them.

The ovens

The coal there made good coke, the fuel a blast furnace needs to turn ore into iron. Coke is made by baking coal in a closed oven until everything but the carbon is driven off. In 1887 the company began building beehive ovens to do it: brick domes with an arched door at the front.

There were 140 ovens at first and 467 in the end, turning out about 600 tons of coke a day for the furnaces of Alabama's iron and steel boom. By 1900 Blocton had about 3,600 people.

West Blocton grew up next door as a town of its own and incorporated in 1901. Then the 1920s took nearly everything at once: a fire in July 1927 burned forty stores and twenty homes in West Blocton's business district, the company shut down the Blocton mines the same year, and the crash followed. West Blocton rebuilt. Blocton did not; what was left of it became part of West Blocton, and the rows of ovens still stand there in Blocton Coke Ovens Park.

The logo

The logo is one of those ovens, drawn twice. The left half is the oven as built: brick, blackened by use. The right half is the same oven as a drawing: section lines, hatching and a dimension.

One side is the thing; the other is the plan for it. Getting from one to the other, in either direction, is what the software is for: model a part and machine it, or scan a part that already exists and work back to its drawing.

Why it's ours

I grew up in West Blocton. The ovens are part of home, and naming the software after them is a way of carrying a piece of that history into something new. The tools have changed a great deal since 1887. Wanting to make things hasn't.

History from: Truman Aldrich, Encyclopedia of Alabama; West Blocton, Encyclopedia of Alabama; Cahaba, Encyclopedia of Alabama; The 1927 fire, Alabama Heritage no. 49; Blocton coke ovens tour notes, Mining History Association.