After the Civil War Tennessee leased its prisoners to private coal operators, and as arrests of freed people climbed, the share of Black prisoners rose from 52 to 75 percent. In the Coal Creek valley, free miners saw convict labor as a way to break their wages. In July 1891 armed miners seized the stockade at Briceville and sent the convicts to Knoxville. On October 31 they burned it and freed more than 300 convicts, and two days later they burned the Oliver Springs stockade and freed 153 more. Militia and a fort with a Gatling gun followed in 1892, and sources put the dead at about 27.
The state ended its leases at the start of 1896 and opened Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros the same year, where state prisoners dug coal themselves rather than compete with free miners. The first inmates numbered about 210. Prisoners built a railroad spur, worked the mines and coke ovens, farmed, and later quarried the stone for the prison's stone building.
James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing Martin Luther King Jr., escaped on June 10, 1977, with six other men over the fence, and was recaptured less than 58 hours later. The prison closed on June 11, 2009. It reopened in 2018 as a tourist site with an audio tour narrated by former inmates, guards and employees, a distillery and restaurants. Go knowing its coal was dug by prisoners, and that the Coal Creek miners helped end the leasing system that came before it.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour