James Cartwright Warner

James Cartwright Warner was appointed secretary of Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company (TCR) in 1868. Soon thereafter he was promoted to general manager. He envisioned coke as a solution for the use of slack coal mined at the Wooten Mine. Accompanied by his young associate, Alfred Montgomery Shook, he traveled to St. Louis to observe an iron works where coke burned from coal was being used as fuel in blast furnaces to produce pig iron, a basic ingredient in the manufacture of iron and steel products. At that time charcoal, a wood product, was being used in the South to fuel the production of iron products., When Warner and Shook returned from St. Louis, a preliminary move was made with a contract with Bartow Iron Company in Bartow, Georgia for a limited amount of coke. The coke was burned in pits on the ground as TCR had no coke ovens. The contract with Bartow Iron Company specified that TCR demonstrate that the coal would coke and that the coke would fuel the making of pig iron., Samuel E. Jones, a young foundryman, was in the employ of TCR. Jones had been a builder of charcoal fuel iron furnaces prior to the Civil War. Jones estimated that he could improvise a blast furnace for around $3,000. He was given a green light to proceed with an experimental furnace. The furnace was completed and christened The Fiery Gizzard. The blast was installed. The run extended about forty-eight hours, making fifteen tons of pig iron, when the stack collapsed for the reason that the red brick used in the construction had burned out. The company immediately (1873) began the construction of coke ovens near the Wooten Mine site. Many of those ovens exist today and have been placed on the National Register of Important Places by the United States Secretary of the Interior., TCR was able to dispose of its coal by converting it into coke, which was sold to the Rising Fawn Iron Company of Rising Fawn, Georgia, Chattanooga Iron Company of Chattanooga, Tennessee and Southern States Coal, Iron and Land Company at South Pittsburg, Tennessee., Warner left TCR, formed Warner Iron Company, and after success in the revival and modernization of the charcoal industry in Middle Tennessee, was in the front ranks of the iron-masters of the South. In the spring of 1889 he was elected president of Tennessee Coal and Iron Company which was then the largest pig iron producer in the South., Source: Walker, Anne Kendrick, Life and Achievements of Alfred Montgomery Shook, pp 69-73, Birmingham Publishing Company (1952)