by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

Post Civil War from 1883 to 1896, the Lone Rock Stockade, known by locals as the Branch Prison, housed convicts leased from the Tennessee State Penitentiary by Tennessee Coal and Iron (TCI) to work in the Tracy City coal mines and coke ovens. The coke oven jobs, unarguably the worst tasks, went to the African American convicts who made up 70-90 percent of the prison population. The intense heat on the ridge where the convicts fed coal into the ovens below melted the soles of their shoes while they breathed the toxic fumes emitted by the coke cooking process. With rations consisting of nothing but potatoes or grits, body lice so abundant 500 were found on a single shirt, four convicts housed in each seven square-foot wooden enclosure with two narrow wooden benches for beds, a wheelbarrow for waste that would overflow into the lake that was the drinking water supply, dysentery and other diseases common, and those shot attempting to flee, not surprisingly the annual mortality rate was 10 percent. What gave birth to the Lone Rock stockade convict lease practice, why did it die, and did it? Follow the money. At the Feb. 8 unveiling of the South Cumberland State Park Visitors Center exhibit, “Condemned to Labor: Convict Leasing and the Lone Rock Stockade,” Dr. Tiffany Momon and Dr. Camille Westmont walked the brave back in time to examine the convict lease system and its role in shaping post-Civil War Tennessee.

Introducing the exhibit, Director of Installations Rob Barret observed, “The way we used to think about telling history in state parks was we didn’t want to make people sad, they were here for fun.” The Lone Rock exhibit departs from that norm. Momon, professor of Public History at the University of the South, assigned the task of crafting the exhibit to her class. The students’ original proposal far exceeded what the single wall allocated to the project could accommodate. Momon hopes going forward the park will grant her more space for stepping out of bounds to tell the story of the complex and harsh truth. Archaeologist Westmont, currently a professor at the University of Alabama, initiated research on the stockade in 2019 when teaching at Sewanee.

Westmont laid out a timeline of the circumstance that earned Tracy City a prison complex designed and built for the sole purpose of working prisoners at the coke ovens and in the mines, with the towering stockade as the central focal point. Pre-Civil War, the Sewanee Mining Company, which donated the land for the University, went bankrupt building the railroad line up the mountain from Cowan, Westmont explained. Post Civil War, enterprising Arthur St. Clair Colyar seized on two opportunities: transforming the low-quality coal on the mountain into highly marketable coke by burning off the impurities and leasing convict labor.

The end of slavery resulted in a labor vacuum for southern planters. “We have accounts of how come harvest time the sheriff would go out and start rounding up people [former slaves], charging them with loitering or vagrancy,” Westmont said. But that was just the tip of the iceberg in the practice of re-enslaving African Americans. In 1860 the Tennessee prison population was less than 5 percent African American; by 1890 it was 75 percent black. Backed by New York City investors rallied by Colyar, Sewanee Mining reemerged as Tennessee Coal and Iron with the Tracy City mining and coke oven operation a silver spoon in the mouth of the rich.

“Prior to the Civil War, there wasn’t much of anything up here,” Westmont observed. Leasing convicts to work Tracy City area mines began in 1871, with a new stockade built in 1883 to replace the Union army structure initially used to house convicts. To begin with, Colyar leased 300 convicts from the state. By 1890, TCI was leasing every convict in Tennessee, yielding the state revenue of $1 million per year. “In many Southern states revenue from leasing prisoners made up a significant portion of the state budget,” Westmont stressed.

By 1890, the stockade constructed to house 200 inmates, housed 666. African Americans were regarded as “not totally human,” Westmont insisted. It was believed African Americans “didn’t feel pain the same way white people did,” thus the rationale for tasking them with the grueling coke oven operations. Most were arrested for petty crimes. Theft of a fence rail earned a man time at Lone Rock. The average age was 30. Financially, the system was far more cost effective than slavery. TCI did not have the expense of feeding and housing the laborers when they were children too young to work or too elderly and feeble to work. “These prisoners, we don’t own them. If one dies, get another,” said a former enslaver praising the system.

TCI exploited the free miners, as well, by controlling not only the miners’ source of revenue and using convicts as strike breakers, but also by controlling how the miners spent their earnings. The mining company owned most of the local businesses. In 1892, the free miners rebelled, burned the stockade, loaded the convicts on coal cars and sent them back to the Nashville penitentiary.

The Tracy City stockade burning trailed upon a wave of rebellions at other Tennessee coal mines. Known as the Coal Creek Wars, six stockades were burned in two years. Except in Tracy City, the convicts were set free, but not necessarily for humanitarian reasons. The $25 bounty offered for escapees proved the system’s downfall.

The bounties owed to those returning escaped convicts soared to huge sums. “Tennessee is the only state in the South where convict leasing ended for financial reasons,” Westmont pointed out. “TCI made it clear they would not pay the $25 per prisoner bounty, and the state said, ‘We are done with this. We are losing money.’”

When Tennessee abolished convict leasing in 1896, the convicts at the Lone Rock Stockade were sent to Brushy Mountain State Prison which had its own coal mining operation. The practice of subjecting convict laborers to inhumane working conditions continues today in the meat and poultry industry, according to Westmont

TCI moved its center of operations to Birmingham and merged with U.S. Steel. The people of Tracy City were left with the financial basis of their culture gone, a polluted water supply, and extensive environmental damage. Local resident Travis Turner recalls when he was growing up “a layer of soot and coal dust still blanketed” some areas. “Tracy City never recovered,” Westmont said.

South Cumberland State Park hopes to receive a grant to maintain and refurbish the Lone Rock Stockade coke ovens at Grundy Lakes. A longer-range plan envisions Grundy Lakes as a state historic park also highlighting Westmont’s excavation of the stockade site. Among the unanswered questions is where was the stockade graveyard? LiDAR investigation under Westmont’s direction failed to yield insight, but Westmont is hopeful more advanced imaging techniques will offer clues. The Lone Rock Stockade is a story of a horrific past with a future of a far different kind. “We have the ability to understand what happened on the land under our feet,” Barret said, “to internalize that to make decisions moving forward ... who was here before me, what were their lives like, and how did my community get to be what it was.”