Remembering the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company
One of the first major industrial enterprises in Scott County gave rise to the Tennessee Railroad
You’re reading “Echoes in Time,” a weekly newsletter by the Independent Herald that focuses on stories of years gone by in order to paint a portrait of Scott County and its people. “Echoes in Time” is one of six weekly newsletters published by the IH. You can adjust your subscription settings to include as many or as few of these newsletters as you want. If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider doing so. It’s free!
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by the Scott County Chamber of Commerce. Since 1954, the Scott County Chamber of Commerce has advocated for a strong community by supporting stronger infrastructure and leadership.
Remembering the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company
It’s been many years since the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company existed. But its impact is still felt strongly in Scott County today, with remnants of this once-major industrial enterprise felt throughout the community.
Paint Rock Coal & Coke was one of Scott County’s first major industries — perhaps the first, although it’s tough to nail down the exact timeline of the rapid industrial growth of the 1880s and 1890s. But one thing is for sure: it gave rise to the county’s first short-line railroad, which would become a defining artery of Scott County’s coal and timber economy, and the future of which is being debated as we speak. And the name “Almy,” still remembered fondly by long-time residents of Paint Rock, came from one of the land procurement agents for that railroad.
Today, the Paint Rock community is loosely described as everything between where S.R. 456 (Paint Rock Road) descends into the valley east of Oneida until it leaves it again at Annadale, near Huntsville. Paint Rock Creek itself actually turns away from the highway at the old coal mining community’s hub of Almy. The western part of the Paint Rock valley is drained by Stanley Creek, which empties into Paint Rock Creek near Almy — or, as it was originally known — Morning Glory. Paint Rock Creek then follows Tunnel Hill Road into the gently rolling hills south of the valley. From just a trickle near Tunnel Hill, Paint Rock Creek rolls through Sugar Camp Hollow, merges with Cherry Fork Creek, and then with Stanley Creek to become a major stream before flowing on to New River at a place the locals once called River Junction. It was in those rolling hills south of the valley, between Cherry Fork and Tunnel Hill, that coal was first discovered.
The story of the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company begins with the arrival of the Cincinnati-Southern Railroad through Scott County in the 1870s and 1880s. Prior to the railroad, most Scott Countians lived a subsistence lifestyle — which is to say that they still literally lived off the land. There were a few folks who were employed, usually self-employed with small general stores or mills or blacksmith shops. But for the most part, there was no organized industry here. The railroad changed that.
When the railroad came, outsiders who were intimately familiar with the coal and timber industries arrived on the scene and discovered the vast natural resources that had been right under our noses the entire time. Perhaps there were Scott Countians who were well aware of the value of those resources but didn’t want to alter the landscape, which looked remarkably different back then, around 1880, than it does today. But as organized industry sprang up to extract the resources, jobs became available for the first time. It was an era that fundamentally changed Scott County — not just because there were paychecks to be had, but because competition for the jobs placed a much higher value on education.
In time, seven different short-line railroads would spring up in Scott County — more than in any other county along the Southern Railroad route. There was the Oneida & Western, the Brimstone, the Kentucky & Tennessee, the short-lived Knoxville & New River, short spur lines at Helenwood and Glenmary, and the Tennessee Railroad, though it was known back then as the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company Railroad. And that is where the story begins.
Among those who came to survey the Southern Railroad route was a man recorded in local historical records only as “Dr. Gruno.” He was described as a Union physician during the Civil War who later worked as a railroad surveyor. Efforts to further identify him have proven futile.
During his survey work, Gruno discovered large coal deposits along the headwaters of Paint Rock Creek, east of Oneida. He returned to Cincinnati and brought several investors to Scott County, including a W.M. Appleby (or Applebee) and Robert Hibbler. Together, they formed the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company.
At about the same time the Paint Rock company was being formed in 1889, major mining operations were springing up in Helenwood and Glenmary. Like the one at Paint Rock, these would be relatively short-lived, but each of them gave rise to a community that has long out-lasted the mining days.
Almost immediately after Gruno, Appleby and Hibbler founded the Paint Rock company, they began building a short-line railroad from the Oneida station on the Southern Railroad to Morning Glory, which would come to be known as Stanley Junction. The railroad was the essential first step. Without it, any coal extracted from the Paint Rock headwaters could not be moved to market at viable cost.
But the aspiring entrepreneurs faced a huge obstacle: a large hill along the headwaters of Paint Rock Creek. It stood between Oneida and the coal-bearing valleys below. The company’s construction crews resolved the problem by tunneling directly through the hillside, cutting a 402-foot-long passage lined with timbers. It became the fourth railroad tunnel in Scott County (the other three were along the Southern Railroad in the New River area), and it gave the Tunnel Hill community a name that endures to this day, although the roof of the tunnel was taken off more than 50 years ago.
Beyond Tunnel Hill, the grade into the valley descended at 3.6% at its steepest point — a gradient severe enough to fundamentally shape the economics and operations of every railroad that would subsequently use the line. The grade so limited the number of loaded coal cars that engines could pull up the hill that it was estimated to have doubled the railroad’s operating expenses. A dedicated “hill run” engine was later stationed at Stanley Junction specifically to pull loaded trains up the steep climb to Oneida.
In the decades that followed, railroad engineers periodically revisited the problem, considering alternate routes that would have linked to the Knoxville & Ohio Railroad in Jellico via a massive tunnel through the Cumberland Mountains, or crossed Fork Mountain south of Brimstone to connect with the Harriman & Northeastern Railroad. Both were ultimately deemed cost-prohibitive.
In the fertile valley near where Stanley Creek emptied into Paint Rock Creek, the mining community took shape with miners’ houses, a commissary, and coal tipples — where the extracted coal was weighed and loaded onto rail cars.
In September 1890, a man named Adrian Almy opened a post office there, and the community became known as “Almy.” It was later the site of Almy School. The road across the mountain that we know today as Huntsville Hill Road was originally called Old Almy Road.
The largest mines at Paint Rock were known as the Cornbread Mines. Caswell Sexton — part of the large Sexton family that lived at Paint Rock before the mining operations began — served as a check weighman at the Cornbread Tip House. He was elected by his coworkers as a sort of ombudsman, checking against the company’s weigh master to ensure accurate measurement of the output. In other words: he made sure the miners were getting paid for the proper amount of coal they extracted; that the company didn’t short them. He remained in that position until the Paint Rock company went out of business.
The Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company mined the bituminous seams of coal underlying the ridges along Paint Rock Creek’s headwaters, and also converted raw coal into metallurgical coke through a process of high-heat carbonization in beehive-style ovens. Coke was a critical industrial commodity during that era, serving as the primary fuel for iron and steel blast furnaces throughout the industrial South and Midwest. Unlike the coke ovens at the much larger coke operation in Glenmary, the ones at Paint Rock do not still exist.
In 1902, the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company was sold to investors from New Rork. Letcher Sexton, the son of Caswell Sexton who provided a deep history of the Paint Rock community, indicated in his oral recordings that a Colonel Roberts took over the operations.
As part of the reorganization, the railroad began expanding. From the Cornbread Tip House, where it formerly ended, it was extended about two miles to just below Jake’s Branch.
In 1905, the railroad sold again, this time to Samuel Spencer, who was president of the Southern Railroad. It was Spencer who reorganized it as the Tennessee Railroad, a name that would stick for the remainder of the railroad’s existence.
Spencer realized that the New River Lumber Company, which had recently established a band mill at Norma and was sitting on nearly half a billion board feet of standing timber in the Bird Lands, would need a rail outlet to the Southern Railroad connection to Oneida. So he continued expanding the Tennessee Railroad toward Norma, following Paint Rock Creek to New River, then following the river south to Norma. His son, Henry B. Spencer, continued that vision after his father was killed in a Thanksgiving train crash in Virginia in 1906. By 1912, the railroad had made it past Smokey Junction to the Scott-Campbell county line. Finally, in 1925, it reached its terminus at Devonia in Anderson County.
The Almy Post Office, which had given the community its name, closed in August 1909, and postal operations moved to Oneida. In time, the “Almy” designation faded from common use and was gradually replaced by the more descriptive name, “Paint Rock.”
It has been more than 120 years since the original coal mines played out on Paint Rock Creek. Later strip mining operations would extract more coal from the headwaters of the valley, but it was that original operation, between 1889 and 1905, that defined — and continues to define — the Paint Rock community.
Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be Threads of Life tomorrow. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!
◼️ About the IH • IH Sports Network • The Encyclopedia of Scott County
◼️ Subscribe • Sponsor • Manage Your Account
◼️ Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube
Our Newsletters:
• Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
• Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
• Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
• Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
• Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
• Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)