Fiery Gizzard

Coal was found near Tracy City in the 1840s when Ben Wooten's sons dug a groundhog from under a stump. When the Sewanee site proved less productive, the mining company ran its tracks ten miles farther to the Wooten site, which became the town. Arthur Colyar saw that iron smelting needed coke and experimented with making it. The 1873 furnace made only fifteen tons of iron before it collapsed, but it proved the quality of the local coal and set the town's economic course. Herman Baggenstoss's long campaign later brought the South Cumberland Recreation Area.

What the plaque says

Fiery Gizzard Side 1: Nearby, in the early 1870's, a crude experimental blast furnace was built by Samuel E. Jones for the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company. Called "Fiery Gizzard", the furnace was to determine if coke burned from local coal was of suitable quality for making iron. The furnace produced only fifteen tons of iron before the stovepipe fell on the third day of operations. However, the moderate success at Fiery Gizzard contributed heavily to the development of the iron industry in (Side 2) Tennessee and the South, and to the development of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (now a division of United States Steel) into the South's largest steel producer. The parent organization of the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company was the Sewanee Mining Company, whose president, Samuel Tracy, donated five thousand acres of land, one million board feet of lumber, twenty thousand tons of free transportation, and two thousand tons of coal to the founding of The University of the South at Sewanee.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 11 mi
  The Episcopal university on the Cumberland Plateau, founded in 1857 as a school for the slaveholding South and now examining that history through its own Roberson Project.
• Savage Gulf State Park — 14 mi
  Roughly 19,000 acres of gorge and sandstone bluff on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, a state park of its own since 2022, with the Stone Door and a National Natural Landmark.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 26 mi
  A 2,000-year-old enclosure of piled stone and earth on the bluffs above the forks of the Duck River, built by Native people between about 80 and 550 A.D., with a museum and waterfall trails.
• Ross's Landing — 28 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.

More markers nearby

• Lone Rock Coke Ovens — 0.6 mi
• Highlander Folk School 1932-1962 — 3.9 mi
• Crossroads of War — 5.3 mi
• Monteagle Sunday School Assembly — 5.9 mi