1 Cent - T.C.I. and R.R. Co. (Ensley, Alabama) ND

Reverse

Blank.

Edge

Plain

Comment

The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (1852–1952), also known as TCI and the Tennessee Company, was a major American steel manufacturer with interests in coal and iron ore mining and railroad operations. Originally based entirely within Tennessee, it relocated most of its business to Alabama in the late nineteenth century. With a sizable real estate portfolio, the company owned several Birmingham satellite towns, including Ensley, Fairfield, Docena, Edgewater and Bayview.

The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company was founded as the Sewanee Furnace Company, a small mining concern established in 1852 by Nashville entrepreneurs seeking to exploit Tennessee's rich coal reserves and the 19th century railroad boom. After losing money, the business was sold to New York investors in 1859 and reorganized as the Tennessee Coal and Rail Company, but the outbreak of the Civil War the following year saw the fleeting company repossessed by local creditors. It became Tennessee's leading coal extractor over the next decade, mining and transporting coal around the towns of Cowan and Tracy City in the Cumberland Mountains, and soon branched out into coke manufacture. This practice of both extracting and moving coal to market by building private rail tracks was not unusual at the time, as by owning the tracks that served their mines, businesses could undercut rivals at market by saving money on transportation. A Thomas O'Connor purchased the company in 1876 and expanded the business into iron manufacture in order to stimulate coke sales, building a blast furnace near Cowan. The business was subsequently renamed the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company. TCI never again changed its name, despite a later expansion into Alabama following the 1886 purchase of the Birmingham-based Pratt Coal and Iron Company. Such was the industrial importance of Alabama to TCI that in 1895, the company relocated its offices to Birmingham, relegating its native state to relative unimportance.