Lone Rock Coke Ovens

Lone Rock Coke Ovens. Grundy Lakes Historic Area. Coal, Coke and Colyar define Tracy City , The Sewanee Fumace Company, a small mining concern, was established in 1852 by Nashville entrepreneurs seeking to exploit this area's newly-discovered coal reserves. , After a troubled start, the business was sold to New York investors In 1859 and reorganized as the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company (TCR), but the outbreak of the Civil War the following year dealt the young company another setback. At the end of the war, however, TCR had been taken over by a skillful promoter, Arthur St. Clair Colyar. Just a year after the end of hostilities, Colyar had coal moving by rail out of Tracy City once again. , It seems to have been Colyar who realized the future of coal coke. In the North, "coke" was the fuel of the future for the iron and steel industry. To create coke, raw coal was heated, but not burned. Pre-heating the coal turned it into a more efficient, hotter-burning fuel, and thus more valuable for the production of steel. So, using primitive pits on the ground, TCR experimentally converted 5,377 bushels of coal to coke as early as 1868. , Then, in 1873, at a cost of $3,000, Samuel E. Jones erected the famous Fiery Gizzard coke iron furnace, a demonstration project in Tracy City. The furnace collapsed after three days, but 15 tons of iron were produced thus demonstrating that Sewanee coal could be used, on a large scale, to produce marketable iron. , Colyar wasted no time in seizing on this opportunity. He ordered the construction of some 120 "coke ovens", and from there, business took off. Once processed in beehive-shaped ovens -- the remains of which you see here the coke could be loaded on rail cars and taken down the Mountain Goat railroad line to market. , By 1875, TCR's production grew to nearly 110,000 tons of coal and over 16,000 tons of coke. In the next five years, its coke output would quadruple. In 1876, TCR property was valued at a million dollars, and included 21 miles of railroad track, five locomotives, 550 coal cars and 120 coke ovens. The operation's monthly output grossed $30,000-a formidable sum in those days. , Colyar sold his interest in TCR in 1876. In 1882, the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company became the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI). Alfred Montgomery Shook, a Confederate veteran, was made general manager and Einar Oswald Nathurst became superintendent. Both had a keen interest in the welfare of Tracy City. , As a result, Tracy City prospered. Ike Woodward started a newspaper in 1886, and in 1889, Shook donated the entire cost of building a new, state-of-the-art school for the community. , Moreover, the town's industry was diversifying. Sam Werner's lumber mill was growing into one of the largest businesses of its kind in the state. Electric lights were first turned on in 1904, with power provided by the Werner Lumber Company's generating plant each evening, from "quitting time" at 5:00 until 11:00 p.m. , In the meantime, TCI expanded its operations into Alabama with the 1886 purchase of the Birmingham-based Pratt Coal and Iron Company. , Such was the industrial importance of Alabama to TCI that in 1895, the company relocated its offices to Birmingham, which cast a long shadow across the future of Tracy City. A protracted period of labor agitation had begun, starting with an 1892 uprising, when free miners evicted leased convict laborers from Lone Rock. In 1905, when troops were ordered to Tracy City to quell free mine laborers' unrest. , At one time the second largest steel producer in the United States, TCI was listed on the original Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896. However, in 1907, the company merged with its principal rival, the United States Steel Corporation, and sold its Tracy City assets to the Tennessee Consolidated Coal company (TCC). , The days of large-scale coal production in Tracy City were over. By the 1920s, the Lone Rock mine and coal processing site was all but abandoned; TCC donated the land to the State of Tennessee. The site remained an environmentally-hazardous eyesore until 1935, when Company 1475 of the Civilian Conservation Corps, stationed nearby at what was then Grundy State Forest, cleaned up this site, built a large dam and transformed it into a lakeside recreational area, a remarkable restoration that has returned an ugly industrial eyesore to a naturally beautiful area. , Photo caption (left): A photo from the 1870s, showing TCR's Lone Rock operations. This photo was taken from what is now the bottom of the lake behind you, looking up at the row of coke ovens. , Photo caption (center): The coke ovens originally had a handsome sandstone front. Today, that facade is gone, as is part of the beehive-shaped oven; what you see is the brick lining of the oven. A railroad track ran atop the ovens, so coal could be dropped into the oven from above. , Photo caption (right): Part of the coal tipple for the Rattlesnake Mine, which was across the lake from where you now stand.