Early history The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company was founded as the
Sewanee Furnace Company, a small mining concern established in 1852 by Nashville entrepreneurs TCI relocated its offices to Birmingham in 1895, Its 1900 asset sheet listed 17 blast furnaces, 3256 beehive coke ovens, 120
Solvay coke ovens, 15 red ore mines,
From forced labor to paternalism The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company was one of the largest users of
prison laborers, mostly Blacks convicted of petty crimes, as a method for paying fines. This practice was common for obtaining coal mining labor in Alabama at the close of the Reconstruction era. The number of convicts employed increased after
U.S. Steel acquired TCI in 1907, as did the brutality of the conditions in which they labored. In 1908, the first full year of U. S. Steel's ownership of TCI, almost 60 prison workers died from workplace-related accidents. In the 1910s, TCI undertook a comprehensive program to stabilize its labor force, excluding prison laborers,
Listing on the Dow Jones Index and merger with U. S. Steel The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company's status was bolstered when it became one of the first 12 companies to be listed on the inaugural
Dow Jones Industrial Average, compiled in May 1896. However, it was not long before TCI was eclipsed by its principal competitor, the
United States Steel Corporation, a huge conglomerate formed in 1901 out of the enormous
Carnegie and Federal steel empires. By the time of the
Panic of 1907, U. S. Steel felt confident enough to launch a takeover bid of its Southern rival. On the morning of Saturday November 2, banker and tycoon
J. P. Morgan, one of the founders of U. S. Steel, convened a meeting in his library and there suggested that U. S. Steel purchase the stock of an insolvent Wall Street brokerage firm, Moore and Schley, which had secured huge loans against 6 million TCI shares. This was not an entirely selfish gesture, as Morgan recognised that the failure of Moore and Schley would send investor confidence in the markets into a nose-dive.
E. H. Gary, president of U. S. Steel, agreed in principle to this transaction, yet argued that without careful political maneuvering the deal would be seen by
Congress as an effort to create a monopoly and thereby encounter troublesome federal
anti-trust litigation. Morgan himself had been burnt by crusading Washington
trust-busters in 1902 when his
Northern Securities Company had been forcibly broken up by the government in a landmark test case. In response to his concerns, Morgan sent Gary on an urgent mission to Washington that Sunday so that the deal might not be vetted by President
Theodore Roosevelt himself before the stock exchange opened the next day. Convinced by Gary that U. S. Steel only wished to purchase Moore and Schley's stock in order to inject liquidity into the firm and thereby shore up investor confidence in the wider economy, Roosevelt granted the transaction antitrust immunity in November 1907, a decision for which he was later derided by critics as a hypocrite.
U. S. Steel TCI was not fully incorporated into U. S. Steel, and continued to operate as an extremely profitable subsidiary of its parent company well into the 20th century. Immediately following the merger, a venture was launched to create a new, larger TCI plant to the west of Ensley and at the center of a new company town, and so in 1910 work on the planned community of
Corey, Alabama, began. Corey was soon renamed Fairfield, and the steel works there opened in 1917. With the discovery of new coking coal and ore deposits in the region, and with the aid of U. S. Steel's enormous capital, the Fairfield works were quickly expanded with the construction of new steel mills and rail links. Several rolling mills were completed in 1917, which produced ship materials for the nearby shipbuilding plants in
Chickasaw, Alabama, in support of America's sudden entry into
World War I. In 1920 a direct rail line between Fairfield and Birmingport, the new port of Birmingham on the Warrior River was opened. This was followed by the completion of the 'High Ore Line Railroad', which connected the
Red Mountain and the Fairfield works; trains literally rolled down the hill from mine to mill. In 1923 a merchant steel mill was completed, followed by the opening of a sheet products mill in 1926. TCI proved to be so efficient at making cheap steel that a post-merger internal tariff (the 'Pittsburgh Tariff') was levied by U. S. Steel from 1909 on all steel coming out of the Birmingham region. This was an effort to negate the competitive edge of Birmingham steel over U.S. Steel's own Pittsburgh product. TCI's independence as a separate legal entity from its parent corporation ended in 1952, a century after the founding of the Sewanee Furnace Company, when it became the Tennessee Coal & Iron Division of U. S. Steel. The memory of the historic importance of TCI was not lost when a short book to celebrate the Tennessee Company's centenary was published by U. S. Steel in 1960:
Biography of a Business. Stagnation and decline began in 1962 when a majority of the mines in the Birmingham region were closed as domestic ores and coal were superseded by cheaper foreign products, especially from
Venezuela. The 1970s and 80s brought about a downsizing and eventual consolidation of the Fairfield and Ensley works, mirroring the general decline of heavy industry in the US throughout those decades. ==Current operations==