The
first steel rails snaked through the steep hills east of Nashville
in search of coal and timber. Capitalists had been talking
about the potential wealth lying undevelopeed under the Cumberland
Plateau since the Civil War. The exploitation of the eastern
part of the region began in the postwar period. But development
of the western plateau, which ran through Cumberland, Fentress,
Putnam and White Counties in the Upper Cumberland, awaited rail
access. The one major exception was the Bon Air coal field
in White County, developed in the 1880s by George Dibrell of Sparta,
a well-connected Democratic power broker and former Confederate
general.
To
reach Bon Air the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway extended
a spur line into White County. The economic effects of this
one rail line foreshadowed what rail connections would do for the
region as a whole. Between 1888 and 1904 coal companies built
four towns on Bon Air Mountain. Bon Air Coal itself employed
600 men, including many county natives, who mined under the supervision
of immigrant Scots. The spur line also accelerated the exploitation
of the county's timber. By 1899 the county had twenty sawmills,
an axe handle factory, and a spoke factory. Between June 1898
and June 1899 the county shipped by rail over 1,000 cars of wood
industry products.
Source: "Country People in the New South:
Tennessee's Upper Cumberland (Studies in Rural Culture)" ,
by Jeanette Keith, page 78
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