Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of John G. Newlee of Claiborne, Tennessee
At the base of Cumberland Mountain, where Gap Creek cuts down toward the little town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, a square stone stack rises beside the water. Visitors today know it as the Newlee Iron Furnace. In the nineteenth century it was one piece of a working industrial village at one of the most famous passes in Appalachia, a place where charcoal smoke and the ring of an iron hammer mixed with wagon traffic along the Wilderness Road.
The surviving chimney began life around 1819, when investors built a cold blast charcoal furnace on the stream below the cave that Dr. Thomas Walker had noted in his 1750 journal as having water “sufficient to turn a mill.” The National Park Service describes how workers stacked local sandstone into a tall, tapering shell and lined the interior with firebrick so that ore, limestone, and charcoal could be smelted into pig iron. Each day the furnace consumed roughly 625 bushels of charcoal, more than six tons of ore, and over 1,500 pounds of limestone to produce about three tons of iron, some sold to nearby blacksmiths and some shipped as “pigs” down the Powell River toward Chattanooga.
The name that stuck to the furnace, however, was not that of its early builder. By the middle of the century it had become known as Newlee’s Iron Furnace, after a local merchant and landholder whose paper trail reaches from a Claiborne County estate book to federal almanacs and congressional war claims.
This is the story of that man, John G. Newlee, and of what it meant for one Appalachian businessman to sit at the crossing point of iron, mail, and war.
From Beaty’s charcoal stack to Newlee’s iron works
Modern surveys agree that the furnace itself predates Newlee. A well researched summary on AbandonedOnline, drawing on National Park Service and marker research, places construction between 1813 and 1835 under Tennessee ironmaster Martin Beaty. It describes a thirty to thirty five foot limestone chimney lined with firebrick, accompanied by a casting shed, storehouse, and flour mill, with a thirty foot overshot water wheel driving the air blast.
In the technical literature of the period the site appears simply as the “Cumberland Gap furnace,” one of several charcoal stacks along what geologists would later call the dyestone ore belt. The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide to the Furnaces, Forges and Rolling Mills of the United States, compiled by J. Peter Lesley in 1859, lists a “Cumberland Gap” furnace in its East Tennessee section, evidence that the works had attracted enough notice to enter national directories of iron production.
By the 1840s and 1850s, ownership shifted toward the man whose name the furnace now carries. A Kentucky field conference guide and National Park Service research both indicate that local businessman John G. Newlee acquired the Gap furnace and associated waterpower between about 1845 and 1850 and operated it under the name Newlee Iron Works, while earlier owners faded from daily management.
Under Newlee’s direction the complex was more than a single stack. Interpretive work at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and later photo essays point to slag heaps, water races, and building platforms that once held a hammer mill, storehouse, and workers’ houses. Together they formed a small industrial village where Gap Creek’s fall powered bellows and hammer while the surrounding ridges provided timber for charcoal and ore from the Rockwood Formation.
Merchant and creditor in the Gap country
Newlee does not first appear in the record books as an ironmaster. One of the earliest clear traces comes from a Claiborne County estate settlement. In a nineteenth century accounting for the estate of John Chumbley, a Tennessee transcription shows the executor noting small but telling payments: “Paid J. G. Newlee account $8.66” and “Paid G. Newlee & Tyler account $8.42.”
Those brief lines say several things at once. They place Newlee within the local credit network of Claiborne County, receiving payments from a neighbor’s estate and probably extending goods or cash out of a store or mercantile partnership. The mention of “G. Newlee & Tyler” hints at a broader family and business web, with the furnace owner tied into regional trade through both kin and associates.
Taken together with later references, the Chumbley settlement suggests that by the middle decades of the century Newlee was the kind of man who had accounts on other people’s books, who sold supplies on credit, and who acted as a node linking the farm country around Cumberland Gap to distant markets. The iron furnace and mill fit naturally into that role. They turned the trees and ore of the surrounding hills into a commodity that could move downriver, while the store and office collected debts in coin, livestock, and promises.
Federal postmaster at “Cumb’d Gap, Tenn.”
Newlee’s reach was not limited to private business. By the 1850s his name appears in federal reference books as the United States postmaster at Cumberland Gap.
The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge, a government based annual that printed official lists of post offices, includes a table captioned “Place” and “Postmaster.” Among the entries is the terse line “Cumb’d Gap, Tenn. J. G. Newlee,” listed alongside Cooperstown, New York and other towns.
A separate Post Office Directory compiled from official records for July 1, 1856 arranges Tennessee post offices by county and gives the compensation and net revenue for each. In the Claiborne County and Cocke County sections, the name “John G. Newlee” appears in the roster of postmasters, again tying him to the federal mail system in East Tennessee.
These are dry books, built of names and numbers, but they underline how important the Cumberland Gap furnace village had become. As postmaster, Newlee was the man who handled the letters and newspapers that moved in and out of the pass, the person through whom federal authority touched daily life at the Gap. For a merchant ironmaster this position dovetailed with his business. Customers ordering supplies or marketing iron could use the post office in his charge, while federal mail routes ensured regular contact with markets and officials in Knoxville, Lexington, and beyond.
Newlee’s iron works and the people who ran it
By the time those almanacs went to press, the furnace at Gap Creek was widely known as Newlee’s. National Park Service interpretation today notes that the works, still a cold blast charcoal furnace, operated “throughout the 1800s,” turning local ore and limestone into ingots that went to both nearby blacksmiths and more distant foundries.
A late twentieth century archaeological overview for Cumberland Gap National Historical Park treats the “John G. Newlee Iron Foundry Complex” as a distinct historic resource. It reconstructs a small company settlement along Gap Creek with the stone chimney at its core, flanked by casting sheds and water powered works, and notes that during the postwar years Newlee undertook repairs and improvements that show up in sketches and maps from around 1870.
Interpretive scripts based on tax rolls and probate ledgers describe him as owning roughly 800 acres around the Gap in the 1850s, along with enslaved laborers and other personal property. In that sense he was typical of Southern ironmasters who relied on a mixture of enslaved and hired free workers to cut timber, burn charcoal, mine ore, and tend the furnace. In the narrow valley below the pass, those workers converted forest and rock into a steady stream of pig iron.
The numbers give a sense of scale. According to National Park Service figures, each working day required hundreds of bushels of charcoal, over six tons of iron ore, and more than three quarters of a ton of limestone to yield about three tons of iron. An enthusiast’s reconstruction based on nineteenth century cost data estimates the daily output in the 1870s at just over three tons at a cost of about nineteen dollars and forty cents per ton, with finished pigs weighing around 150 pounds apiece.
Some of those pigs stayed close, feeding blacksmith shops in Claiborne County and nearby Kentucky. Others went onto flatboats and rafts, floated down the Powell River toward Chattanooga, and entered regional trade. Marker research and travel narratives alike stress that the Gap furnace was one of the last charcoal operations still active in the dyestone belt by the late 1870s, a stubborn remnant of an older technology in an era when coke fueled furnaces were rising along railroads.
War in the Gap and a ruined industrial village
When the Civil War came, Cumberland Gap became a military gateway and the industrial settlement along Gap Creek stood directly in the path of armies. Throughout 1861 and 1862 Confederate and Union forces alternately held the pass, fortifying the heights while turning the valley below into a corridor for wagon trains, artillery, and refugees.
Secondary accounts based on National Park Service research and local memory describe how the furnace works were pressed into service as a storage site for ammunition and supplies. AbandonedOnline, drawing on a 2020 waymark and park interpretation, notes that during the war the foundry and its surrounding structures served as a depot, its sturdy stone walls and proximity to water making it a natural magazine.
Operationally, the war years were a break in production. Modern summaries place the furnace’s active life from about 1820 until around 1880 “except for the Civil War years,” when military needs and the drain on local labor and charcoal interrupted regular smelting.
The conflict did not just pause the business. It damaged it. Timber cutting for fortifications and firewood further stripped the slopes that had fed the charcoal pits. Armies seized livestock, wagons, and stores from nearby farms and businesses. Artillery and infantry moving through Gap Creek valley scarred the industrial site itself. When the fighting finally ebbed, the furnace village that John G. Newlee had built was a battered asset.
War claims and the long reach of Washington
The next clear appearance of Newlee’s name in official records comes not in a county ledger or almanac but in the language of federal war claims. After the war, Congress allowed Southern Unionists and loyal citizens to seek compensation for property taken or destroyed by United States forces. Many of these claims, including those from East Tennessee, were funneled to the Court of Claims in Washington.
The United States Congressional Serial Set includes an entry for “Newlee, J. G., report of Court of Claims,” indicating that his case reached the stage where the court issued findings. A later index of government publications lists “Newlee, J. G.” in a section summarizing petitions reviewed by the court and transmitted back to Congress, again tying the Gap ironmaster to this postwar process.
By the 1870s the man himself was gone. Petitions on behalf of his estate appear in the Congressional Record, introduced by Tennessee representatives and referred to the House Committee on War Claims. One such entry identifies a family administrator seeking “pay for property taken by the United States Army,” a phrase that likely encompassed both industrial assets at the furnace and other holdings near the Gap.
The case took years to resolve. In the 1890s an appropriations act finally set aside funds to satisfy judgments recommended by the Court of Claims. Among the terse lines authorizing payments is one that reads, in substance, “To [the administrator] of John G. Newlee, deceased, late of Claiborne County, [a sum of] four thousand two hundred and fifty dollars.”
That single sentence does several things. It confirms his residence in Claiborne County. It affirms that federal authorities accepted his claim that United States forces had taken or destroyed property at or near the Gap. And it shows that the value of that property, in the eyes of the court and Congress, ran to thousands of dollars, a considerable sum in the late nineteenth century.
For historians, the war claim file, the Court of Claims report, and the appropriations act together offer a near primary reconstruction of what was lost at Cumberland Gap. They also show how far the consequences of a mountain war reached, from a damaged furnace by a small creek to a line in an act of Congress in Washington.
After Newlee: heirs, land, and the coming of Middlesboro
Even after John G. Newlee’s death, his name lingered in the records of the region. Late nineteenth century litigation over land at Middlesboro, Kentucky, preserved an 1853 judgment in his favor and a later verbal sale to local capitalist John C. Colson, Sr., as courts untangled the overlapping claims of investors in the new coal and iron town. Those cases are evidence that his holdings stretched beyond Gap Creek and into the Yellow Creek and Middlesboro area that would become a planned industrial community in the 1880s.
Genealogical sources and newspaper notices from the turn of the twentieth century mention other men named John or John G. Newlee in the Cumberland Gap and Bell County orbit, including a circuit court clerk whose 1904 funeral drew large crowds. Those later Newlees should not be confused with the mid nineteenth century ironmaster, but they hint at a family that remained woven into the civic and commercial life of the region.
By around 1880 the furnace itself fell silent. National Park Service and secondary accounts place the end of operations in that decade, shortly after the period when Newlee’s heirs were pressing their war claims. Changing technologies, new transportation routes, and depletion of nearby timber all worked against small charcoal furnaces. New steel rails and larger coke fueled stacks along the main lines had taken over the market that Gap Creek once served.
Remembering John G. Newlee at the furnace ruins
Today the best place to think about John G. Newlee is not in a courthouse file or an almanac but under the trees beside Gap Creek. The stone shell of his furnace stands inside Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, one of the oldest man made structures in the park and a focal point on walking tours and educational programs.
Interpretive panels, heritage walk scripts, and online exhibits now routinely name him as the owner and operator of the works in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They stress how his furnace turned local geology into commerce, how his role as postmaster tied a seemingly remote mountain village into national networks of communication, and how the war that swept across Cumberland Gap nearly destroyed the industrial community he had built.
He remains, however, a partial figure. The official sources that survive are slices of a life, not a full portrait. An estate ledger shows him as a creditor in the accounts of a neighbor. Federal almanacs fix his name in print beside “Cumb’d Gap, Tenn.” War claims testify to losses that were serious enough to fight for in Washington. The furnace ruins themselves speak to years of charcoal smoke and molten iron.
For Appalachian historians, that combination is powerful. Newlee’s story ties together industrial development along the dyestone belt, the growth of federal presence in the mountain South, the experience of a strategic pass during the Civil War, and the long afterlife of war through claims and court cases. It reminds us that the stone stack beside Gap Creek is not only a picturesque ruin but also the material trace of a man who tried to turn a mountain pass into an industrial foothold, and of a family who spent decades negotiating the consequences.
Sources & Further Reading
The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge, for the Year 1855. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1855. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/americanalmanac42unkngoog/americanalmanac42unkngoog_djvu.txt
Leech, Daniel D. Tompkins, comp. Post Office Directory, or, Business Man’s Guide to the Post Offices in the United States: Containing the Names of the Post Offices and Post Masters in the United States on the 1st of July, 1856 … Containing Also a Comprehensive Codification of the Existing Postal Laws. New York: J. H. Colton, 1856. Google Books. https://books.google.com.jm/books?id=zU4ZAAAAYAAJ
Lesley, J. Peter. The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide to the Furnaces, Forges and Rolling Mills of the United States: With Discussions of Iron as a Chemical Element, an American Ore, and a Manufactured Article, in Commerce and in History. New York: J. Wiley, 1859. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ironmanufacturer00lesl
“Settlement of the Estate of John Chumbley.” Claiborne County, Tennessee, Probate Records, ca. 1824–1859. Transcribed at Tennessee Genealogy Trails, “Wills C – Claiborne County, Tennessee.” https://genealogytrails.com/tenn/claiborne/willsC.html
United States Congress. Index to the Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives for the First Session of the Fifty-Second Congress. U.S. Congressional Serial Set, vol. 2968. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, n.d. GovInfo. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-02968_00_00-001-0000-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-02968_00_00-001-0000-0000.pdf
United States. Statutes at Large, vol. 30. “An Act Making Appropriations for the Payment of Judgments of the Court of Claims,” p. 1161 (appropriation to the administrator of John G. Newlee). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, n.d. GovInfo. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-30/pdf/STATUTE-30-Pg1161.pdf
Ahlman, Todd M., Gail L. Guymon, and Nicholas P. Herrmann. Archaeological Overview and Assessment of the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Knoxville: Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, 2005. NPS History. https://npshistory.com/publications/cuga/aoa.pdf
Crawford, T. J., and A. H. Hunsberger. Geology of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. Map and Chart 199. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 2011. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/mc199_12.pdf
Kuehn, Kenneth W., Keith A. Milam, and Margaret Luther Smath, eds. Geologic Impacts on the History and Development of Middlesboro, Kentucky. Kentucky Society of Professional Geologists, Annual Field Conference Guidebook. Lexington, 2003. https://studylib.net/doc/14468631/geologic-impacts-on-the-history-and-development-of-middle
National Park Service. “Iron Furnace.” History & Culture, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. Last updated December 5, 2022. https://www.nps.gov/cuga/learn/historyculture/iron-furnace.htm
National Park Service. “Iron Furnace.” Places, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. Last updated December 5, 2022. https://www.nps.gov/places/iron-furnace.htm
AbandonedOnline. “Newlee Iron Furnace.” Abandoned, February 7, 2024. https://abandonedonline.net/location/newlee-iron-furnace/
The Historical Marker Database. “Iron Furnace.” Entry m=207276. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=207276
Steely, Mike. “Cumberland Gap Iron Furnace Often Overlooked.” The Knoxville Focus, December 2, 2019. https://www.knoxfocus.com/columnist/cumberland-gap-iron-furnace-often-overlooked/
Tennessee History for Kids. “Teacher’s Guide to Long March to Tennessee (2019 Edition).” Tennessee History for Kids, 2019. https://www.tnhistoryforkids.org/teachers-guide-to-long-march-to-tennessee/
National Park Service. “Gap Cave.” Plan Your Visit, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. Last updated September 6, 2023. https://www.nps.gov/cuga/planyourvisit/gap-cave-1.htm
Author Note: Working on John G. Newlee’s story let me connect the stone furnace ruin to the paper trail of the man who ran it. I hope this profile helps you see Cumberland Gap’s iron village as a place where local business, federal mail routes, and wartime damage all intersected in one Appalachian pass.