Knoxville Iron Company

Coal Creek War Begins: Miners Free Convict Laborers, Attack Lease System

| Importance: 8/10

Three hundred Tennessee coal miners successfully besiege the Briceville stockade after midnight on July 15, 1891, the anniversary of Bastille Day, freeing forty convict laborers and their guards and putting them on a train to Knoxville. Later that day, miners march on the Knoxville Iron Company mine …

Tennessee Coal Mining Company Knoxville Iron Company Tennessee Miners John P. Buchanan Thomas J. Brady labor-organizing convict-lease-system corporate-resistance institutional-racism
Read more →