From Foundry to Future: Mississippi’s economic and manufacturing revival feels like home
The author is pictured during an opportunity she had to pour iron at Sloss in Birmingham, Alabama.
Once a supplier to Steel Dynamics, Lora Delhom sees the state’s industrial momentum as both a data-driven success and a family legacy reborn.
By Lora Delhom
Mississippi’s economy has gained steady ground over the past decade, with real gross domestic product climbing from about $109.3 billion in 2014 to roughly $122.4 billion in 2024 (in chained 2017 dollars), according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and USAFacts.
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported Mississippi’s 4.2 percent real GDP growth in 2024 — the second-fastest in the nation — a trend state leaders credit to industrial expansion, a resurgent manufacturing sector, and policy reforms aimed at attracting private investment.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy reports that the state has seen more economic growth in the past five years than in the previous fifteen years combined.
“Mississippi’s economic momentum is real, and our impressive numbers in recent years tell a compelling story,” said Mississippi Development Authority Executive Director Bill Cork in a January 2024 interview with Site Selection magazine.
From 2021 to 2024, Mississippi’s real GDP rose from roughly $115.7 billion to $122.4 billion, BEA data show.
Manufacturing momentum
That momentum feels personal to me. Before editing The Leland Progress, I worked in my family’s third-generation nonferrous casting and machining business outside Chicago — Alcasco Foundry Inc., short for “Aluminum Casting Company.”
My grandfather, Fred Klaviter, started the company during World War II, moonlighting with his own small start up making aluminum blocks for ship engines while running the family diner by day with my grandmother. For years, people assumed “Alcasco” just meant “Al’s Casting Company” — and he never corrected them.
Steel Dynamics was one of our customers before we sold the business and I moved south — officially earning my “damned Yankee” status.
Now that same company is helping lead a new chapter of industrial growth in Mississippi and across America. Watching manufacturing re-emerge from the ground up — and seeing Mississippi at the center of that movement — feels like watching my former life meet my new one.
In Columbus, Kloeckner Metals has broken ground on a $90 million aluminum processing plant, the first tenant in Steel Dynamics’ $2.5 billion Aluminum Dynamics (ADI) Customer Park. The project will supply flat-rolled aluminum for the automotive industry and is designed for expansion.
Kloeckner officials said the new facility “will strengthen our position in the aluminum supply chain and expand our ability to support a rapidly growing market. From the moment trucks pull into the facility, they’ll be met with advanced automation in our raw materials bay that will continue all the way through to finished goods storage and retrieval.”
The Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) noted that Kloeckner’s $90 million facility alone will bring forty high-paying jobs and some of the most sophisticated aluminum processing automation in the nation to the Golden Triangle.”
The MDA further elaborated in saying “this project … showcases how innovation and collaboration are fueling our next chapter…..We’re not waiting for the future. We’re building it in Mississippi.”
Kloeckner recently broke ground on a $90M aluminum processing plant in Columbus, Mississippi.
Together, these investments signal hundreds of high-paying jobs and steady work for the small shops that keep industry running — machining, casting, fabrication, maintenance, and logistics. Shorter supply chains, faster turnaround times, and more vendor opportunities mean tangible progress for Mississippi businesses and communities like Leland.
Despite the gains, Mississippi’s output per person remains among the nation’s lowest, with real GDP per capita at about $41,603 in 2024, according to USAFacts.
But if this momentum holds, this decade may be remembered as the one when Mississippi’s industrial story finally turned a corner — and for me, that’s more than an economic milestone.
My family moved from Michigan to Illinois generations ago to chase opportunity in America. Now, standing here in Mississippi and watching that same spirit return to the South — watching America make things again — feels like seeing my family’s legacy reborn on new ground. It fills my nonferrous, manufacturing-loving heart with something deeper than joy. It feels like home.
