by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

From 1871 to 1896, the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI) leased state prisoners to labor in the Tracy City area coke ovens and mines. The practice, common in Southern states following the Civil War, is being mined from history into the present by University researcher Camille Westmont and University students. The convict lease system solved two problems: the expense of housing prisoners and the labor shortage following the abolition of slavery. Frederick Douglass called the practice “a worse slavery” for African Americans. Unlike slave owners, the coal bosses “had no incentive to keep the workers alive,” Westmont said. Her research into and excavation of the Lone Rock Stockade built to confine the Tracy City area convict laborers sheds light on why.

Westmont came to the University in 2019 as a post doctorate fellow. Her study of mining communities’ experiences led her to the Grundy County Historical Society. When she inquired about local coal mining communities, the docent told her a lot of the mining was done by prisoners. “I’d never heard of the convict lease system,” Westmont admits.

TCI ended an 1871 miners’ strike by bringing in convict laborers, according to an unidentified source cited by Grundy County historian Jackie Layne Partin. Westmont said state records show Arthur St. Clair Colyar, representing TCI, leased 100 prisoners in February 1871, to work in the Tracy City area mines, the first use of convict labor in Tennessee. Colyar initially confined the prisoners at a stockade built by the Union army to house troops. Soon after, TCI built the Lone Rock Stockade in the vicinity of Grundy Lakes, needing a larger facility more suitable for detaining prisoners.

Prisoners were in ample supply. Although built for 400 prisoners, the seven wooden structures at Lone Rock at times accommodated as many as 500 convicts, upwards of 95 percent of them African Americans. The Black Codes, post-Civil-War laws, made it easy for African Americans to get arrested for petty crimes. Westmont cites records showing a mixed-race couple at Lone Rock arrested for miscegenation, a man arrested for stealing a fence post, and children as young as 12. Guards beat prisoners who failed to meet their mining quotas with a leather lash. The annual death rate approached 10 percent. Prisoners died from malnutrition, tuberculosis, typhoid, and diarrhea. Injury, amputation and fatality from mining accidents were common. “They weren’t trained miners,” Westmont pointed out. Records cite a prisoner shot for “running off at the mouth” — i.e., trying to escape while leaving the mines. The state charged lessees a $25 bounty for each prisoner who escaped. Escapees cost the coal bosses money. “From their point of view, it was better to shoot them,” Westmont said. The state would send a replacement for prisoners who died.

According to Partin, in 1892 local white miners rebelled, burned the Lone Rock Stockade, loaded the prisoners on a coal car, and sent them back to Nashville. “The state sent them back to Tracy City,” Westmont said. The prisoners rebuilt the stockade. Researcher and historian Karin A. Shapiro writes, “In 1896 the prisoners were at last removed from the mines.” In 1897 the Zebra Law authorizing the convict lease system was repealed.

Recently Westmont enlisted the help of researchers from the University of Arkansas to conduct LiDAR and thermal imaging with drones to detect the footprint of additional features at the Lone Rock excavation site, possibly a cemetery or a morgue. She conducts frequent tours and encourages people who want to get involved and learn more about the prisoners to participate in the records transcription process by visiting <https://fromthepage.com>; (“Convict Leasing Project-Tracy City”). “I want to raise awareness about the Lone Rock Stockade and the role it played in local culture,” Westmont stressed. She suspects, as once was true of her, many people are unaware the convict lease system ever existed.