Industry

Located in Grundy County, Grundy Lakes and Grundy Forest are part of the South Cumberland State Recreation Area. Grundy Lakes began as an environmentally devastated mining property, part of a complex of 130 coke ovens established and operated by the…

Chattanooga business leader Jo Conn Guild was an outspoken critic of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). He was born in 1887 in Chattanooga, the son of a prominent engineer. He attended Baylor School, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University,…

A family business that grew from a backyard foundry to a major commercial enterprise, Hardwick Stove Company shaped Bradley County's industrial history for over one hundred years. Its founder, Christopher Hardwick, began building cast iron stoves in his Cleveland, Tennessee,…

This state park preserves both a beautiful section of the Harpeth River and several of the most important archaeological properties in the state. The centerpiece is the Narrows Tunnel, designed by ironmaster Montgomery Bell and built by his slaves about…

On July 1, 1933, textile workers at the Harriman Hosiery Mills (HHM) plant in Harriman seized the opportunity created by Section 7 (a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act to organize a local union of the Hosiery Workers, part of…

Tennessee's natural limestone springs, ample timber, and fertile soil for growing grain have made the state an ideal location for whiskey production. Whiskey was an important part of frontier life as both an easily portable diet staple and a medicinal…

The popular image of Tennessee is dominated by country music, Opryland, Elvis, the Smokies, Jack Daniel's, and other icons of mass culture. The essence of the Volunteer State, however, is found in its history of hard working people tilling the…

Bronson Ingram was Tennessee's only billionaire when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-three on June 15, 1995, in his Nashville home. His net worth was estimated at $1.3 billion. In 1994 Forbes national business magazine placed Ingram…

Organized in Nashville in 1897, the Interstate Cotton Seed Crushers' Association operated from 1897 to 1929. It was the second cottonseed trade association, the first having been disbanded in 1887 after the American Cotton Oil Trust absorbed most of the…

Tennessee's nineteenth-century iron industry was located along the Western Highland Rim. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, a large part of this upland portion of the Tennessee River Valley, from Stewart to Decatur Counties, produced a high-quality brown iron ore…

The oldest registered distillery in the nation, Jack Daniel Distillery is located in Lynchburg in Moore County. Established by Jasper "Jack" Daniel in 1866, the distillery produces sour mash whiskey. Daniel located the distillery near his birthplace, recognizing that what…

Kingsport Press was a powerful Tennessee presence in the publishing world for fifty years. The press was initially established in 1922 by Blair and Company, the New York bankers who financed the Clinchfield Railway and the Kingsport town site, with…

In its broadest context, "labor" refers to a very diverse set of conditions: slave and free labor; craft and industrial labor; farm and factory labor; and blue, pink, and white collar labor. Because there are few theses, dissertations, or secondary…

Located on ninety-three acres along the Tennessee River in downtown Lenoir City, the Lenoir Car Works was once the largest and most important business in Loudon County. The earliest operation was the Bass Foundry and Machine Company, which produced iron…

The Lenoir Cotton Mill was one of a series of five mills built by the family of General William Lenoir along Town Creek in what is now Lenoir City. In 1810 Major William Ballard Lenoir, son of Revolutionary War General…

Described as the most historic, yet little known, site in East Tennessee, Long Island played a significant role in the state's early history. Situated on the outskirts of present-day Kingsport on the Holston River, the island was located on the…

Chattanooga capitalist and philanthropist John Thomas Lupton was born near Winchester, Virginia in 1862. Lupton received a law degree from the University of Virginia and settled in Chattanooga in 1887, following a visit to the home of a fellow student,…

The history of Marathon Motor Works provides a spectacular though short-lived example of new industry during one period of Nashville boosterism. Augustus H. Robinson, owner of the Maxwell House Hotel, masterminded the removal from Jackson of the automotive division of…

Established in 1923, Mayfield Dairy Farms has evolved into one of the major southern milk and ice cream products companies. It began as an antebellum family farm in McMinn County that continued as a family-run business into the late twentieth…

Based in Cleveland, Tennessee, Maytag Cleveland Cooking Products began in 1916 as a family-owned and -operated company known as Dixie Foundry. Company founder S. B. Rymer Sr. was a native of Polk County, but his family later immigrated to what…