Arthur S. Colyar Biographical Files

The early history of the University of the South and Sewanee, is so intimately associated, with that of the early history of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, that I will be pardoned for briefly referring to some facts in this connection. In 1851 a roving Irishman by the name of Leslie Kennedy, in wandering through these mountains, became very much impressed with the quantity and quality of the coal around Sewanee and especially around Tracy City. Kennedy went to Nashville and interested a lawyer, Col. W. N. Bilbo, in a scheme to acquire these lands and build a coal road from the junction of the Nashville & Chattanooga road at Cowan to this point and beyond. Col. Bilbo went to New York and interested Mr. Samuel F. Tracy of New York City, and some other moneyed men in the proposed enterprise. A legislative charter was acquired in 1852 for the Sewanee Mining Company, for the purpose of mining and selling coal. The money was almost entirely raised in New York, and the railroad commenced in 1853. In 1856 it was completed to what was know as the Coal Bank, which is about two miles from Sewanee on the road to Tracey City. Subsequently, the road was extended to Tracy City and finished to that point in the fall of 1858. Litigation ensued between the contractor and the owners of the property which resulted in two sales of the entire property, one under a judgment for the State Court of Tennessee and one under a Federal Judgement in the United States Court. The Tennessee creditors, headed by Col. B. F. McGhee of Winchester who was the contractor, bought the property at Tennessee Court sale. One C. A. Proctor, representing the New York creditors bought in the property at the Federal Court sale. Soon after this the Civil War came on and nothing was done with these conflicting claims until the early spring of 1865, when I went to New York as the representative of the Tennessee purchasers and made a settlement and compromise with the New York purchasers, by which it was agreed that the New York purchasers should take $220,000 of bonds on the property and turn it over to the Tennessee purchasers.

An amusing incident occurred at this service. A worshipping the congregation had never before seen a minister in his ministerial robes. When Dr. Quintard got up into the judge's stand in the Court House and began his service, a respectable, honest old shoemaker who had gone to the service was seen to get up and motion to his daughter and leave the house. When asked, after the service, why he did so, his reply was, that although he was ignorant and had never seen much of the world and didn't know much, that his children had been too well raised to see a man preach in his night clothes.

Soon after this time, the first class was confirmed by Dr. Quintard in Winchester. The hidebound Puritanical blue stocking ideas of that day were very much more pronounced than they are now. Dr. James R. Graves, one of the leading Baptist divines of that day, publisher of the Baptist Reflector, and a man who had the great controversy with Parson Brownlow, heard of Bishop Quintard's doctrinal sermon as he called it, and at once advertised the fact extensively that on a certain Sunday he would reply to Dr. Quintard's sermon. An immense audience was assembled in the Mary Sharp College at Winchester, which was then conducted by his brother, Rev. Z. C. Graces as a Baptist Female School. Dr. Graves spoke four hours and ten minutes, making a very violent and denunciatory speech, to which Dr. Quintard paid no attention, and there the incident dropped.

After the close of the Civil War, I became over of the Sewanee Mines and commenced the work of rebuilding and rehabilitating it's property, and right here I went to bring charge of larceny against the University of the South. One of the first things I did was to attempt to get the name of Tracy City changed to Sewanee, for the reason that it had been chartered as the Sewanee Mining Company - the coal had been named Sewanee Coal, and the mines were known as the Sewanee Mines, and we thought, very properly, that the name of the place should be Sewanee. When we applied to the Post Office Department for a change of the name from Tracy City to Sewanee, we were advised that there was already one Sewanee in Tennessee, and that we could not get the