HISTORY CORNER

COL. A.M. SHOOK SPENT HIS LAST YEARS IN NASHVILLE

By Ridley Wills II

Many of you reading this article, have been to Tracy City, Tenn., most likely to buy salt-rising bread or sweet rolls at the Dutch Maid Bakery. About three blocks from the bakery is the elegant home built by Col. A.M. Shook in the last decades of the 19th century. Who is A. M. Shook, you might ask. Alfred Montgomery Shook was, in 1880, the general manager of the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company, headquartered in Tracy City, then the largest town between Murfreesboro and Chattanooga.

Born at his father’s farm in Franklin County in 1845, Alfred was sent by his parents at age 13 to live with his uncle in Winchester, where A.M. went to school. His uncle was postmaster and had a drug store. A. M. clerked in both these establishments to pay for his room and board. During the Civil War, he served in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. After the war, A.M., still a young man, moved to Tracy City where he became interested in the coal and coke industry. By the 1870s, he occupied a position of responsibility with the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company. By 1880, he was general manager, a position he held for a number of years. A generous man, Col. Shook encouraged his company’s miners to build their own homes in Tracy City rather than live in the company’s rough mining camp.

In 1888-1889, he gave $39,700 dollars to build an imposing brick school, which served the children of Tracy City until May 1976, when it burned to the ground. A local historian said that Shook built the school to benefit the children of his employees and the other children in Tracy City. To finance the school, Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company, deducted 50 cents to a dollar from the paychecks of its employees to insure that the school had the funds needed to operate for nine months every year. This continued until 1915 when a more conventional means of school financing was instituted.

In his later years, Col. Shook’s widening financial interests took him to Birmingham and Nashville though he continued to summer at his home in Tracy City until late in his life. Col. Shook spent his last years in Nashville, where he died March 18, 1923.