A Shtetl Grew in Bessemer - Southern Jewish Historical Society

8 SOUTHERN JEWISH HISTORY
Tailor’ . . . [became] as common as the most favorite household
words.” 28 Stein’s tailoring business was still thriving in 1906 as
an ad in The Bessemer Weekly made clear: On Nineteenth Street,
“Under the Grand Hotel,” his store offered the “Finest Tailor-
Made Clothing to Order.” 29 Stein and his wife, Bessie Moses Stein,
had a son, Jacob (Jake) Stein, “the first Jewish boy born in
Bessemer,” whose brit milah was “a gala day among businessmen
here.” 30
Samuel Stein’s history is probably unrelated to another Stein
in early Bessemer history. This other Stein is listed in an 1886 issue
of The Bessemer Weekly as one who “inaugurated . . . a very important
line of business . . . in Bessemer . . . a first class bar. . . .” 31
This Stein was not Bessemer’s only Jewish distributor of spirits.
Jacob Marks, born in Prussia in 1847, established businesses in
Mississippi and Georgia before moving to Bessemer in the late
1880s or early 1890s. Married to the former Rachel Silverstone of
Memphis, Marks became the agent of the Bessemer Liquor Company,
which sold “Whiskies, Wines, Gin, Rum, and Moerlein
Beer” at an establishment on the “Twenty-first Street Adjoining
Alley.” In 1901, Marks “completed and moved into an elegant
residence, the finest in the city. . . .” 32
Another early Jewish resident was Jacob L. Adler, who
owned a two-story business on the corner of Third Avenue and
Twenty-first Street in 1887. In July of that same year Adler saw his
business narrowly escape damage from a nearby fire that encompassed
a hotel, three other businesses, and fourteen two-story
dwellings. 33 Shortly after this traumatic event in the town’s early
life, the firm of Rosenbaum Brothers, general merchants, “rapidly
erected” and opened their store on Fourth Avenue between Seventeenth
Street and Eighteenth Street. Apparently in 1887 this
location was far enough removed from downtown proper that it
was described as being “way out in the woods, and the woods
were so thick that not another building could then be seen.” The
Rosenbaums, the self-proclaimed “Merchants for the People,”
came to Bessemer from Meridian, Mississippi. 34 By 1893 they were
“so well-known” that while advertising seemed “unnecessary,”
nevertheless, there might be some residents of Bessemer who still