Appalachian History Series – Miners and Convicts in the Coal Creek Valley: The Coal Creek War of 1891 to 1892
Where Coal Creek cuts a narrow path between Walden Ridge and Vowell Mountain in Anderson County, Tennessee, the valley looks quiet. Houses and churches cling to the slopes, freight trains still follow the creek, and most travelers think of Rocky Top as a song title or a highway exit. In the early 1890s, though, that same valley was a battlefield where coal miners, company owners, and the State of Tennessee fought over what freedom meant in the Appalachian coalfields.
The conflict became known as the Coal Creek War. It was not a formal war in the sense of opposing armies with uniforms and declared fronts. It was a series of strikes, stockade raids, arrests, and skirmishes that tied together mountain hollows from Briceville to Oliver Springs and eventually helped kill one of the most notorious labor systems in the South.
A valley of coal, railroads, and company towns
Coal Creek is a tributary of the Clinch River. It flows north out of the Cumberland Mountains, through camps like Briceville, then swings east through a water gap in Walden Ridge before joining the river. On one side of the creek rises Vowell Mountain. On the other stands the ridge locals came to call Militia Hill, where state troops later built a fort that looked straight down into town.
By the time the Coal Creek War began, this valley had been tied to wider markets for a generation. Short line railroads reached the district after the Civil War, and companies opened drift mines and company towns along the creek. Briceville, Coal Creek, and smaller camps depended on underground seams and on the line that linked them to Knoxville. The men who walked into those portals in the morning did so as free wage workers. In the late 1880s many miners belonged loosely to the Knights of Labor or other organizing efforts, but they still trusted that contracts and state law could protect at least a narrow space for bargaining.
Above and behind this valley sat another Appalachian story. Southern states looked at prisons full of mostly Black inmates and saw a way to fund governments without raising taxes. Tennessee had already leased convicts to private companies for decades. By the 1880s a single firm, Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad, controlled most of the lease and could sublet men to other industries. Company officers made no secret of how useful that was. One described convict labor as an effective club to hold over free miners, since a convict who died underground could simply be replaced by another man in stripes.
For men at Coal Creek, that club suddenly came down in 1891.
Convict leasing comes to Briceville
In January 1891 miners at the Tennessee Coal Mining Company operation near Briceville won what they thought was a small victory. They secured the right to elect their own checkweighman, the worker who watched the scales and made sure the company could not cheat them by under weighing their coal. The right already existed in state law, but enforcing it on the ground mattered. Within a few months, the company pushed back and demanded that the miners give up the arrangement. When they refused, the company shut down the mine on April 1 and locked the men out.
Rather than negotiate, company officers turned to the state. They made an agreement with Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad, which already leased large blocks of convicts. In the summer of 1891, armed guards marched prisoners into the Coal Creek valley. Company houses that had been built for free miners were torn down, and a new stockade went up at the Briceville mine. Free men who had once thought of themselves as skilled workers now watched convict laborers in stripes march past them to jobs they had lost.
The anger that followed owed something to wages and pride, but also to the way convict leasing trampled existing law. State statutes barred payment in company scrip and guaranteed miners the right to elect a checkweighman. Owners who hired convicts to break a strike were not just hiring cheaper labor. They were using state power to nullify laws that miners believed had been written for their protection.
July 1891: Miners seize the stockade
On July 14 miners from around the Coal Creek valley gathered in a mass meeting. Accounts differ on the precise number, but contemporary reports and later research agree that several hundred men agreed to act together. Two days later about three hundred armed miners surrounded the Briceville stockade. The guards surrendered without firing, and the miners marched both guards and convicts down the valley to the railroad, loaded them into boxcars, and sent them to Knoxville.
They telegraphed Governor John P. Buchanan to explain why. In language reported by newspapers, the miners called their action a necessary step in the defense of their families from starvation and their property from ruin.
The governor responded by calling out three companies of the state guard and traveling to Coal Creek himself. On July 16 he stood before a crowd of perhaps six hundred miners near the tracks and tried to calm the situation. The New York Times summarized his remarks with a simple line. Buchanan said he did not make laws but executed them and that so help him God the law must be obeyed on this occasion.
Under escort, the convicts marched back into the valley. Troops pitched tents along Coal Creek and occupied the rebuilt stockade. Tension eased briefly, but the underlying problem remained.
Within days the miners surrounded the stockade again. This time they trapped not only convicts and guards but also some of the state militia. Outnumbered, the troops surrendered, and the miners once more marched the entire group to the railroad and sent them out of the district. That second humiliation forced Buchanan to call a special session of the legislature and ask lawmakers to reconsider convict leasing.
Truce, politics, and a hill called Fort Anderson
The special session met in Nashville in late summer 1891. Mine owners, company lobbyists, and some urban newspapers warned that giving in to armed miners would invite chaos. Buchanan proposed limiting convict leasing and phasing it out, but lawmakers refused to end the existing contracts. They did expand the governor’s powers to act against insurrection.
Back in Coal Creek the truce was thin. The governor assured miners that he would pursue change, and miners agreed to stand down for sixty days. Convicts returned to the valley under guard. Organizers like Eugene Merrell and George Irish travelled the state, giving speeches about the situation in Anderson County and raising money for families who had lost their wages.
When the legislature adjourned without real reform, patience snapped. On October 31 a group of miners again converged on Briceville and Coal Creek. They seized the stockades, supplied convicts with civilian clothing and food, and ordered them into the hills. Company buildings burned, and for a time armed miners controlled both ends of the valley. Newspapers around the country ran stories about a mountain rebellion against convict leasing.
The state responded more aggressively. Troops returned in force, and by 1892 they had built a permanent camp on the flank of Vowell Mountain. That fort, named Fort Anderson after Colonel Kellar Anderson of the guard, sat on the bare crest of what locals called Militia Hill. Harper’s Weekly would later publish an engraving that showed soldiers around artillery on the ridge, its guns pointed toward the town below, and another that imagined miners firing back from rocks along the slopes.
From that height, state power looked down into every lane, yard, and mine tipple in Coal Creek.
1892: A wider war in the coalfields
By 1892 the conflict had spread well beyond Anderson County. Some of the earliest resistance to convict leasing had come years earlier in Grundy County, where miners at Tracy City had struck against Tennessee Coal and Iron in 1871. That region flared again as the Coal Creek War unfolded. In August 1892 miners at Tracy City and Inman tore down stockades and marched convicts to trains in scenes that echoed Briceville.
In Anderson County itself, miners dug rifle pits along nearby ridges and raided stockades at places like Oliver Springs. One skirmish there left several miners wounded when guards and militia returned fire. At Coal Creek, thousands of miners poured into the valley from Jellico, Kentucky, and other camps. Some accounts describe three thousand men gathering in the hills, hijacking trains, and freeing convicts from multiple camps.
The state escalated as well. General Samuel T. Carnes arrived with hundreds of troops, artillery, and Gatling guns. Artillery crews test fired at least one cannon round into the soft bottom land near the town to demonstrate that Fort Anderson could, if pressed, shell the community itself. Troops patrolled the streets, searched homes, and tried to protect outlying stockades.
Clashes were not formal line battles, but scattered fights, night attacks, and ambushes. Newspapers outside the region described the scene in language they might have applied to a foreign war. One front page from Nebraska carried headlines announcing that Coal Creek had been taken, that General Carnes had relieved Fort Anderson, that citizens were killed in the fight, and that bushwhackers had attacked a force from Knoxville.
By the time the shooting stopped, roughly twenty seven miners were dead, at least seven soldiers and guards had been killed, and more than five hundred miners had been arrested at some point in the fighting.
Trials, politics, and the end of convict leasing
In the courtroom, the state tried to make examples of a few leaders. Indictments poured in, many for conspiracy or carrying arms, some for murder. Yet juries rarely handed down severe punishments. Only a small handful of miners, including figures like P. B. Monroe and S. A. Moore, served time, and even they spent less than a year in prison.
In politics, the consequences were sharper. Governor Buchanan alienated mine owners by meeting with miners and alienated miners by failing to secure immediate repeal of convict leasing. His own party turned against him, and he failed to win renomination in 1892. Voters elected Peter Turney, a judge who promised to deal with convict leasing more decisively.
Turney and the legislature did not end convict leasing overnight, but they refused to renew the state’s main contracts. Legislation in the mid 1890s funded a new state penitentiary and the Brushy Mountain prison farm in nearby Morgan County. When leases expired in 1896, Tennessee became one of the first Southern states to abandon the convict lease system. From that point forward, convicts mined coal directly for the state, and free miners in private camps no longer faced leased prisoners as direct competitors.
Many miners and later historians have argued that the Coal Creek War played a central role in that shift. The cost of keeping militia in the field, the negative national publicity, and the moral questions raised by the conflict made convict leasing far less attractive politically than it once had been.
Memory on the ridge today
Fort Anderson did not last long in its original form. The guard abandoned the post in 1893. Over time, trees reclaimed Militia Hill, and the earthworks softened into humps along the ridge. Yet the landscape still carries the memory. Trails now climb the slope, and interpretive markers explain how the fort once looked out over Coal Creek with cannon and breastworks.
Down in the valley, local efforts like the Coal Creek Watershed Foundation have worked to connect the convict lease uprising with later tragedies. In 1902, an explosion at the Fraterville Mine killed more than two hundred men. In 1911, the Cross Mountain disaster near Briceville killed eighty four more, including veterans and descendants of Coal Creek War miners. Together, those events turned the valley into a kind of open air archive of coalfield labor history, where the fight against convict leasing and the dangers of industrial work are woven together.
A state historical marker at Rocky Top now bears the title The Coal Creek War, 1891 to 92. It reminds travelers that this quiet valley once saw an armed rebellion against the state by free miners seeking an end to the leasing of convicts to coal companies. The sign notes that the revolt was subdued by state militia but led to the eventual abolition of the convict lease system and to the creation of Brushy Mountain State Prison.
Why the Coal Creek War matters
The Coal Creek War grew out of a very specific corner of Appalachia, but its questions reach much further. What happens when a state uses prisoners to undercut the wages of free workers. How do communities respond when laws written to protect them are set aside in practice. Where is the line between protest and insurrection in a company town where the company holds both the payroll and the jail keys.
For the miners who gathered along Coal Creek in 1891, the answers were written in risk. They did not win every demand they made, and many families suffered when breadwinners were killed, wounded, or arrested. Yet their willingness to march guards and convicts to the railroad and to stand on ridges looking down at Fort Anderson helped make convict leasing politically impossible to defend.
Today, standing on Militia Hill or beside the creek at Rocky Top, it is hard to picture trains filled with convicts, miners firing from the trees, or militia guns aimed at a mountain town. That distance can be misleading. The valley that once hosted the Coal Creek War still reminds us that the shape of work, punishment, and freedom in Appalachia has always been contested, and that even a small creek cutting through the Cumberland Mountains can become a stage for a struggle that changes state law.
Sources & Further Reading
The Morning News (Savannah, Georgia). July 17, 1891. Page 1. Georgia Historic Newspapers. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn86063034/1891-07-17/ed-1/seq-1/.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Coal Creek and Prison Labor Reform.” Education Outreach Activity Bank, US History 11. Tennessee State Library and Archives, n.d. PDF. https://s3.amazonaws.com/tsla.tnsosfiles.com/education/Activity%20Bank/Activity%20Bank/High%20School/US%2011%20Coal%20Creek%20and%20Prison%20Labor%20Reform.pdf.
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Coal Creek Labor Saga.” Lesson plan, 2019. PDF. https://tsla.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/education/2019%20Lesson%20Plans/PDF/Coal%20Creek%20Labor%20Saga%20Final.pdf.
Wild, Amanda, and Emily K. Robinson. “Briceville Community Church and Cemetery.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 2003. PDF. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/2109c113-5d8b-4e68-97b4-5885ad162183.
Coal Creek Watershed Foundation. “Coal Creek Watershed Foundation.” Coal Creek Watershed Foundation, Inc. https://www.coalcreekaml.com/.
Coal Creek Watershed Foundation. “Coal Creek’s Fort Anderson at Historic Militia Hill.” Tennessee River Valley Geotourism MapGuide. https://tennesseerivervalleygeotourism.org/entries/coal-creeks-fort-anderson-at-historic-militia-hill/13266c29-3b13-4e1b-a6fa-6b79960ae365.
“Why Miners Fought.” The Historical Marker Database. Marker near Rocky Top, Tennessee, 2017. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=101895.
Hutson, A. C., Jr. “The Coal Miners’ Insurrections of 1891 in Anderson County, Tennessee.” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 7 (1935): 103–121. PDF. https://teachtnhistory.org/file/The%20Coal%20Miners%27%20Insurrection%20of%201891%20in%20Anderson%20Co.%2C%20TN%20%28Hutson%29.pdf.
Hutson, A. C., Jr. “The Overthrow of the Convict Lease System in Tennessee.” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 8 (1936): 82–103. PDF. https://teachtnhistory.org/file/The%20Overthrow%20of%20the%20Convict%20Lease%20System%20in%20TN%20%28Hutson%29.pdf.
Daniel, Pete. “The Tennessee Convict War.” Labor History 16, no. 4 (1975): 565–593. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42623533.
Shapiro, Karin A. A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. https://aaas.duke.edu/books/new-south-rebellion-battle-against-convict-labor-tennessee-coalfields-1871-1896.
Jones, James B., Jr. “Convict Lease Wars.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Tennessee Historical Society. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/convict-lease-wars/.
Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. “Tennessee Prison System.” Tennessee Historical Society. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/tennessee-prison-system/.
Mielnik, Tara Mitchell. “Anderson County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Tennessee Historical Society. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/anderson-county/.
Todd, Donald. “Morgan County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Tennessee Historical Society. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/morgan-county/.
Gibson, Kylin M. “Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary: A History.” M.A. thesis, Middle Tennessee State University, 2018. PDF. https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/bitstreams/5fbce6be-6c8b-488d-87a1-cde458885a9d/download.
Mancini, Matthew J. One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. https://www.vitalsource.com/products/one-dies-get-another-matthew-j-mancini-v9781643364100.
Mancini, Matthew. “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing.” Journal of Negro History 63, no. 4 (1978): 339–352. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj414.
Schept, Judah. Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia. New York: New York University Press, 2022. https://redemmas.org/titles/36552-coal-cages-crisis-the-rise-of-the-prison-economy-in-central-appalachia/.
Teach Tennessee History. “The Coal Creek War.” TeachTNHistory.org lesson plan, n.d. PDF. https://teachtnhistory.org/file/The%20Coal%20Creek%20War%20Lesson%20Plan.pdf.
Author Note: I hope this piece helps you see how one small creek in Anderson County can change the way we think about labor, punishment, and power across the wider Appalachian region.