Editing Lenoir City, Tennessee (section)

===Lenoir City Company===
{{See also|Cardiff, Tennessee}}
[[Image:Lenoir-city-museum-tn1.jpg|thumb|210px|right|The Lenoir City Company office building, now the Lenoir City Museum, built in 1890 and designed by the [[Baumann family (architects)|Baumann Brothers]]]]

In the late 1880s, an abundance of financial capital, the popularity of social theories regarding [[Planned community|planned cities]], and a thriving coal mining industry in East Tennessee's [[Cumberland Plateau]] region led to the development of several [[company town]]s to support coal mining throughout the upper [[Tennessee Valley]]. Most of these were funded by investors from the Northeastern United States or Knoxville.

In 1889, Knoxville railroad magnate [[Charles McClung McGhee]] and his friend and associate [[Edward J. Sanford]] formed the Lenoir City Company. They believed the Lenoir plantation would be the ideal location to develop such a town. The company incorporated in April 1890 with $800,000 in stock<ref name=nrhp /> and purchased the Lenoir estate, which then consisted of {{convert|2700|acre|ha}}, for $300 per acre.<ref name=nrhp /> When the company issued the stock to the public, the investors each received stock in the company and a lot in the planned town.<ref name=benhart>John Benhart, ''Appalachian Aspirations: The Geography of Urbanization and Development in the Upper Tennessee River Valley, 1865-1900'' (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), pp. 74-79, 90-92, 97.</ref>

Lenoir City was laid out in a grid pattern with four quadrants, west of Town Creek and north of the railroad tracks. The city's northwest quadrant was planned for middle class and affluent residents, whereas the northeast quadrant would be for the city's wage-workers. The southwest quadrant would contain heavy industry, such as blast furnaces, steel works, and other large factories, while the southeast quadrant would contain woodworking, furniture, and canning factories. Influenced by late 19th-century reform movements that stressed health and [[temperance movement|temperance]], the developers set aside several lots for public parks, and a large garden area was planned between the railroad tracks and the river.<ref name=benhart />

A recession in the early 1890s froze financial markets. By 1892, the company had sold only 144 of the town's 3,448 lots. McGhee and Sanford persisted, however, and while Lenoir City never developed as fully as they had conceived, it survived. McGhee convinced a rail car company to open a factory in Lenoir City, and a short time later a knitting mill was established. Both establishments still employed several hundred workers in 1910.<ref>Benhart, pp. 116-117, 122-123.</ref>