Alfred Montgomery Shook

Alfred Montgomery Shook was born on a farm five miles south of Winchester, Tennessee. When he was thirteen he moved to Winchester to live with his Uncle, Allen Shook, who was Winchester's postmaster and also owned a drug store. In order to earn his keep, the young Shook worked as a clerk in these establishments. At age sixteen he enlisted in the Confederate Army and was made 3rd corporal, Company K, Starnes 4th (also called 3rd) Tennessee Cavalry. In February 1862 he was captured in the surrender of Fort Donaldson and spent most of the remainder of the war in Federal prisons. After the war he returned home in 1866. In a few weeks he went to Tracy City to clerk in the store of Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company (TCR). He spent nearly forty years in the service of the company filling nearly every position from clerk, timekeeper, bookkeeper, superintendent, general manager and vice president., In 1847 Arthur St. Clair Colyar married Agnes Erskine Estill, the second daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Wallace Estill. Almost twenty-five years later another daughter of the Estill's was of marriageable age. On August 17, 1871 Teresa Estill and Alfred Montgomery Shook were married. The wedding took place at the home of the Colyar's in Nashville. By the time of the marriage Shook was well established with TCR. The couple made their home in Tracy City. They had a son, Paschal Green Shook, who was born on May 27, 1872 in Nashville at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Arthur St. Clair Colyar., Shook accompanied the general manager of TCR, James Cartwright Warner, to St. Louis in 1868 to study the process by which coal was being converted into coke to be used as fuel in blast furnaces to produce pig iron. Shook's business career was mostly with TCR to become TCIR and later TCI after it sold its railroad in 1887. At the Tennessee company he mastered the production of pig iron using southern iron ore. Southern iron ore contained a high content of phosphorous and was not suitable for use in the process for the manufacture of steel in the United States, known as the Bessemer process. Steel produced in the United States was then produced in the North using northern ores., During a period when Shook was not associated with TCI due to a change of ownership, he, in association with Percy Warner, son of James Cartwright Warner, and Nathaniel Baxter, Jr. organized the Southern Iron Company and acquired the Roane Iron Company in Chattanooga where open-hearth furnaces were put into operation in 1890 for experimental purposes. This was the first successful effort in the South to manufacture steel on a commercial basis. Shook had traveled to England. There he met Benjamin Talbot who was the recognized authority on the basic open-hearth method of making steel. Talbot returned with Shook to the United States and was put in charge of the Southern Iron Company in Chattanooga. After Shook returned to TCI Talbot worked with it until 1893 in conducting experiments with an all open-hearth plant in North Alabama. On November 30, 1899 the first heat of steel was made. , Alfred Montgomery Shook declared: , The Tennessee company now demonstrated that open-hearth steel could be successfully and commercially manufactured in the Birmingham District, and that basic open-hearth rails could be successfully and commercially manufactured and sold in competition with Bessemer rails., When TCI moved its operations to Ensley Town, Alabama in 1904 Alfred Montgomery Shook retired. His principal residence was in Nashville but he continued to maintain the magnificent Second Empire style home he had built in Tracy City in 1892. He maintained that home until his death in 1923. His estate sold the home to Sam Werner, Jr., owner of Sam Werner Lumber Company. It is today (2024) owned by one of Werner's descendants and listed on the National Register of Important Places by the United States Secretary of the interior., Shook provided the citizens of Tracy City with an architectural high style public school that he named in memory of his father, James K. Shook School. The school was provided under an agreement with the citizens of Tracy City that they would send their children to the school and provide for its operation and maintenance. In 1915 the town was incorporated and fulfilled the terms of the agreement until it was set afire by an arson in 1976., Source: Walker, Anne Kendrick, Life and Achievements of Alfred Montgomery Shook, pp. 89-95, Birmingham Publishing Company (1952)