Tracy City's development was shaped by coal, coke, and Arthur St. Clair Colyar. The Sewanee Furnace Company was established in 1852 by Nashville entrepreneurs to exploit newly discovered coal reserves, then sold to New York investors in 1859 and reorganized as the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company, though the Civil War soon set it back. After the war, Colyar revived coal shipments by rail from Tracy City and recognized the promise of coke as a hotter, more efficient fuel for iron and steel production. The company experimentally converted 5,377 bushels of coal into coke in 1868, and in 1873 Samuel E. Jones erected the Fiery Gizzard coke iron furnace in Tracy City. Although the furnace collapsed after three days, it produced 15 tons of iron and showed that Sewanee coal could be used on a large scale to make marketable iron. Colyar then ordered the construction of about 120 coke ovens, and the processed coke was shipped by rail on the Mountain Goat line to market. By 1875, company production had reached nearly 110,000 tons of coal and more than 16,000 tons of coke, and over the next five years coke output quadrupled. In 1876, the company's property was valued at one million dollars and included 21 miles of track, five locomotives, 550 coal cars, and 120 coke ovens, while monthly output grossed 30,000 dollars. Colyar sold his interest that year. In 1882 the company became the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, with Alfred Montgomery Shook as general manager and Einar Oswald Nathurst as superintendent, and Tracy City prospered through new community investments, a newspaper begun by Ike Woodward in 1886, a new school funded by Shook in 1889, industrial diversification through Sam Werner's lumber mill, and electric lights introduced in 1904. As the company expanded into Alabama and moved its offices to Birmingham in 1895, Tracy City's future dimmed. Labor conflict also grew, including an 1892 uprising in which free miners evicted leased convict laborers from Lone Rock and unrest in 1905 that brought troops to Tracy City. Once the second largest steel producer in the United States and part of the original Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896, the company merged with United States Steel in 1907 and sold its Tracy City assets to the Tennessee Consolidated Coal company, ending the era of large-scale coal production there. By the 1920s the Lone Rock mine and processing site was nearly abandoned, and in 1935 Civilian Conservation Corps Company 1475 cleaned up the hazardous property, built a large dam, and transformed it into a lakeside recreational area.