Industry

When Aladdin Industries located its corporate headquarters in Nashville in 1949, it also introduced a progressive industrial design to Nashville's emerging corporate landscape. The company built a modern International-style headquarters designed by the firm of Spencer Warwick Associates on South…

Organized as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1888, the company changed its name in 1907 to the Aluminum Company of America and began using the acronym ALCOA in the early 1900s after applying the acronym to company-owned sites in Tennessee.…

Montgomery Bell, early Tennessee industrialist and ironmaster, was born in West Fellowfield Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, the youngest of ten children, to John Bell and Mary Patterson (spelled by some members of the family as "Pattison"). Too young for active…

Developed by the Jackson Fibre Company (a division of the Bemis Brothers Bag Company) beginning in 1900, the town of Bemis rose from the cotton fields of Madison County as a model company town created by the vision of Judson…

The Brock Candy Company dates to 1906, when William Emerson Brock, a traveling sales representative with the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, purchased the Trigg Candy Company of Chattanooga. Three years later, he reincorporated the company as Brock Candy Company.…

For over half a century, F. W. Brode ranked among the leading cottonseed products brokers in the United States. His skill in developing markets for cottonseed meal helped ensure the success of the infant cottonseed processing industry after the Civil…

Procter & Gamble organized the Buckeye Cotton Oil Company in 1901 to provide a reliable supply of cottonseed oil for the soaps and lard substitutes the company manufactured. Such popular Procter & Gamble products as Ivory soap and Crisco shortening…

The origins of the Tennessee copper mining industry can be traced back to 1843, when a gold prospector discovered copper near Potato Creek in the southeast corner of Polk County. Copper mining began in 1847, and the Hiwassee mine became…

Aaron K. Burrow, whose success in the trading of cotton linters assumed strategic importance during World War I, was born in Carroll County, the son of the Reverend Albert Gibson Burrow and Elizabeth Polk Burrow. From age seventeen, when he…

Names for this company have changed through the years, but the early factory site off Murfreesboro Pike in Nashville has not, and the importance of this plant cannot be overstated. Nashville's Mayor Thomas Cummings (elected 1938) induced Aviation Corporation of…

Hiram S. Chamberlain, a founder of the modern iron industry in the South, was born in Franklin, Ohio, on August 6, 1835, to Vermont natives Leander and Susanna Chamberlain. The fourth of eight children, Chamberlain attended the Eclectic Institute (later…

Founded in 1903, Chattanooga Bakery Company is best known for the production of a single product--Moon Pies. The company began operations as an attempt at vertical integration by Chattanooga's Mountain City Flour Mill in an attempt to take advantage of…

This significant Chattanooga business was founded in 1901 by Charles Rief to provide glass bottles for his brewery. Soon the company also began producing bottles for the infant Coca-Cola bottling industry, established in the city in 1899. With the advent…

In 1879 Chattanooga businessman Zeboim Cartter Patten and a group of friends established the Chattanooga Medicine Company. Its first two products, Black-Draught and Wine of Cardui, were so successful that they were sold well into the twentieth century. Patten procured…

Arthur S. Colyar, attorney, political leader, newspaper editor, and industrialist, was born in Jonesborough, one of thirteen children of Alexander and Katherine Sevier Sherrill Colyar. Colyar received his education in the Washington County common schools, and in 1828 he moved…

Tennessee's early patterns of commercial exchange determined the location and growth of its urban centers. Commercial centers typically formed at some junction of land and water that required a break in the mode of transportation, usually from animal-powered overland wagons…

Without the cotton gin Tennessee never would have evolved into a major antebellum cotton market; the cotton fibers produced here were too short for hand ginning or roller ginning, which could be performed on the long-staple cotton found along the…

Located in northern Dickson County is the historic village of Cumberland Furnace, the site of the first ironworks in the region which later became Middle Tennessee. The village is the oldest community south of the Cumberland River between Nashville and…

Few areas in the United States symbolize the American pioneer spirit more than Cumberland Gap. Crossing the gap meant encountering America's first western frontier and symbolically severing European ties. Between 1760 and 1850 more than 300,000 people walked, rode, or…

Dell Computers became an important corporate employer in Middle Tennessee when it announced in May 1999 that it would expand operations from its central Texas base to the Nashville area. In August 1999 the company opened its Eastgate manufacturing facility,…