Looking Back On Our History
The Other McCord Brother
If you’ve spent any time digging into Bibb County’s Baptist roots, you’ve almost certainly come across the name Howard F. McCord. Born in Calera in 1888, Howard grew up to become a farmer and an assistant agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture — but he’s remembered today for a different kind of harvest. In 1979, he published Baptists of Bibb County: A Denominational Salute to the People Called Baptists in Cahawba (Bibb) County, Alabama, 1817–1974, a sweeping record of the county’s Baptist churches, cemeteries, and congregations. Genealogists and local historians still lean on it today — his book is cited again and again in cemetery transcriptions and family histories across the county, and in 1976 the Bibb County Historical Association honored him for his contributions to the community. If you attended the Centreville Baptist Church in the 20th Century you probably knew him as a leader as well as a fixture on the pews. Howard McCord’s name is, quite literally, woven into the record of who we are.
But Howard had an older brother most people around here have never heard of — and it is his story that deserves more of our attention today.
Carey Pratt McCord: Bibb County’s Forgotten Pioneer
Carey Pratt McCord was born September 25, 1886, in Bibb County, the son of a Baptist minister. Like his younger brother, Carey got his start at Howard College in Birmingham, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1907. From there, though, his path diverged sharply from the family farm. He traveled north to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to study medicine, earning his M.D. from the University of Michigan in 1912.
What Carey did with that medical degree over the next six decades helped shape an entire field of medicine that barely existed when he was born: industrial hygiene — the science of protecting workers from the hazards of their own jobs.
After a stint researching glandular function for Parke-Davis in Detroit, Carey found his true calling investigating the diseases caused by industrial work itself — the poisonings, the lung ailments, the slow damage done by lead, dust, fumes, and solvents in the workplaces of a rapidly industrializing America. He became, by many accounts, one of the “big five” pioneers of American industrial and occupational health, alongside legends like Alice Hamilton.
His career reads like a tour of early twentieth-century American public health:
- Director of the Industrial Health Conservancy Laboratories (1919–1951), a private research organization devoted to workplace toxicology
- Associate professor of preventive medicine, University of Cincinnati (1920–1935)
- Director of Industrial Hygiene for Detroit’s Department of Health (1937–1940)
- Director, Michigan State Board of Health’s Department of Industrial Health
- Faculty, Wayne University Medical School (from 1937)
- Faculty, University of Michigan School of Public Health (from 1940), where he continued lecturing and consulting for thirty-five years
- A sixteen-year consulting relationship with the Chrysler Corporation
Along the way, Carey McCord became a founding member of the Michigan Industrial Hygiene Society in 1937 — the organization’s very first local section — and was later named one of its honorary members, an honor shared with only a handful of the field’s most influential figures.
A Prolific Pen
If Howard’s legacy is one landmark book, Carey’s legacy is a mountain of them. Over his career, he is credited with publishing more than 20 books and roughly 3,000 articles. Among his notable contributions:
- A 1928 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics bulletin describing a new diagnostic test for industrial lead poisoning, based on the presence of basophilic red blood cells — a genuine clinical advance in an era when lead exposure quietly crippled workers in trade after trade
- Odors: Physiology and Control (with William N. Witheridge), a standard reference on the science of industrial odor
- A Blind Hog’s Acorns: Vignettes of the Maladies of Workers (1945), his own narrative memoir of decades spent chasing down occupational diseases — described by reviewers as “a panorama of human interest, sparkling with humor, gripping in pathos and tragedy,” and still regarded as a classic of the field
- A 1974 paper on “polymer fume fever,” published when McCord was in his late eighties — proof that his curiosity about workplace hazards never really retired
Coming Home, in a Sense
Carey McCord retired from active work in 1976 and returned to his home in Cincinnati, Ohio. He died on October 14, 1979, in Appleton, Wisconsin, at the age of 93 — the same year, coincidentally, that his brother Howard’s history of Bibb County Baptists finally reached print.
The two McCord brothers, sons of a Bibb County Baptist minister, took remarkably different paths: one stayed close to home and spent his life preserving the record of the community’s faith; the other left for the industrial North and spent his life protecting the health of the men and women who built it. Between Howard’s book on our church pews and Carey’s decades of research into the dangers lurking in our factories and mills, the McCord name left its mark on two very different, and equally important, kinds of history.
Want More ?
Pick up a copy of his book, A Blind Hog’s Acorns. Find out why a phrenologist examined his head with his fingers at a young age and told his parents he would live hopelessly incompetent and useless life. It is an entertaining read.
