extensive use of convict labor, its leaders arguing that this labor was more reliable than paid (and often unionized) labor. The company operated a stockade prison near Tracy City, which was the subject of labor unrest at the time of the Coal Creek War in northeastern Tennessee. Conditions in the prison and the coal mines were harsh, with the prison population dying at an average rate of 10% per year during its period of operation. The company also provided convict labor to other coal mining operators when they experienced or were threatened by labor action. Hostility in the state to the use of convict labor led to its end there in 1896. TCI relocated its offices to Birmingham in 1895, where it could still use convict labor, relegating its native state to relative unimportance. Canny investments and the purchase of major competitors in 1888 and 1892 under the direction of financier Hiram Bond, TCI Corporate General Superintendent, saw the firm grow rapidly. The corporation was for several decades one of the few major heavy industries based in the largely agricultural Southern United States, by a wide margin the largest blast furnace operator in the South and at one time the second largest steel producer on the continent. Its 1900 asset sheet listed 17 blast furnaces, 3256 beehive coke ovens, 120 Solvay coke ovens, 15 red ore mines, as well an extensive network of railroads, although following the panic of 1893 the company shifted its primary interests from railroads to steel. TCI's largest industrial plant was located in Ensley, a company town founded in 1886 on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, by company president Enoch Ensley. Ensley was served by the sizable Birmingham Southern Railroad, one of TCI's early acquisitions, and from 1899 contained four 200-ton blast furnaces. In 1906 two more furnaces were constructed, and 40,000 tonnes of steel were produced that year, feeding Ensley's integrated rail, wire and plate mills. The company was fiercely competitive with the larger Pittsburgh steel businesses to the north, owing to the remarkable fact that all the natural resources required to produce steel were located in abundance within a relatively small radius of the Birmingham mills. From forced labor to paternalism The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company was one of the largest users of prison laborers, mostly Blacks convicted of petty crimes, as a method for paying fines. This practice was common for