The following excerpt is from at article posted October 10 at the Chattanooga Times Free Press website.
The mostly-forgotten history of Tennessee’s convict leasing, which used prison labor to mine coal in the mountains during the 1800s, is being brought to light by a team of professors and genealogists across the state.
Camille Westmont, a postdoctoral fellow in historical archaeology at University of the South in Sewanee, is searching for answers to the Lone Rock Stockade’s dark past in Grundy County.
Westmont started the project a couple of years ago after a volunteer at the local museum told her coal in Tracy City had been mined by prisoners.
Today, ovens where the coal was processed, called coke ovens, are still visible from the roadside while driving through the mountains. It was in those mines and coke ovens that African American men were often forced to work after being imprisoned on racially-based charges like interracial marriage.
On the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, one mining company replaced a former Union Army stockade called the Lone Rock Stockade, which had been built when the Union Army took over the local coal mine. The inadequacies of the military stockade as a prison are likely what led to the construction of the Lone Rock Stockade around 1872 — to have a purpose-built prison located right next to the new Lone Rock Mine.
Read the full article at the Chattanooga Free Press website. Note that you will need to register to read it (FREE). It’s worth taking the time to do it. It’s a good article, shedding light on a not-so-good past.