Last updated: April 23, 2026
- Type: Former iron-mining community (now unincorporated)
- Location: Approximately 6 miles from Jasper, in the ridges east of the Sequatchie Valley
- Named for: Probably John Hamilton Inman (1844-1896), New York financier and TCI investor
- Heyday: Late 19th through early 20th century
Inman was the iron-ore mining leg of the integrated Marion County industrial complex of the late 1800s and early 1900s. While Whitwell supplied coal and Victoria produced coke, Inman supplied the iron ore that fed the blast furnaces at South Pittsburg. The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI) operated at least two numbered mines here. Marion County ranked second among Tennessee counties in iron production in the 1870 Census of Manufactures, behind only Hamilton County.
Setting
Inman sits in the broken country east of the Sequatchie Valley floor, about six miles from Jasper, where the western face of the Cumberland Plateau steps down toward the Tennessee River. The limonite and brown-hematite iron-ore beds that defined the community's industrial era run through the ridges here, interbedded with sandstone and shale. The terrain is ridge-and-hollow, cut by small streams that drain toward the Tennessee, with narrow benches of farmland between the iron outcrops. Inman was never a compact town; it was a cluster of mine adits, ore dumps, company buildings, and worker housing spread across several ridges, tied to the South Pittsburg furnaces and Victoria coke ovens by a rail spur. Today the old workings are mostly reclaimed by forest, and Inman survives as a rural crossroads with the name preserved on maps and cemeteries.
The ridges and hollows here carried Indigenous use long before the iron mines. Rockshelter and camp sites along the plateau escarpment document Archaic and Woodland occupation, part of the valley's deep prehistory traced on the In the Beginning page; by the 18th century this country fell within the Chickamauga (Lower) Cherokee homeland on the Tennessee River side of the Cumberland Plateau. The remaining Cherokee community was forcibly removed along the Trail of Tears in 1838, decades before the iron beds here were commercially mined. The Cherokee Nation continues today as a sovereign nation headquartered in Oklahoma.
The naming and John H. Inman
The mine almost certainly takes its name from John Hamilton Inman (1844-1896), the New York financier who in 1882 led a group acquiring a two-thirds interest in what was reorganized as the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. TCI branded many of its properties after key investors, and no other individual named Inman appears in the Marion County record.
The Sequatchie Valley iron district
Iron-ore deposits in the ridges around Inman had been known locally for decades before they were seriously exploited. An 1863 map of Marion County already identifies iron-mining sites in the area. The arrival of British capital in the 1870s, through the Southern States Coal, Iron and Land Company and the investments led by James Bowron, made commercial-scale mining viable. Rail connections tied Inman to Victoria's coke ovens and South Pittsburg's blast furnaces, creating an integrated production chain.
Mining operations
The iron ore at Inman was brown ore (also called brown hematite or limonite), the dominant type extracted along the western face of the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, yielding roughly 40 to 50 percent iron. TCI operated at least two mines: the Tennessee Coal and Iron No. 1 Mine (Inman Mines) and the Tennessee Coal and Iron No. 3 Mine (Inman Mines), both recorded in the 1945 War Minerals Report as "past producers." Ore was shipped by rail to South Pittsburg, where two blast furnaces (built 1879 and 1881) converted it into pig iron.
Convict labor
TCI used convict leasing at its Marion County mines, including at Inman. On August 15, 1892, during the Coal Creek War, miners removed convicts from the TCI stockade at Inman, two days after miners in Grundy County had destroyed the stockade at Tracy City. The liberation of Inman was followed within days by attacks on the Oliver Springs stockade and Fort Anderson in the original Anderson County coalfields. TCI maintained convict leasing at its south Tennessee mines after other companies had abandoned the practice. The state of Tennessee abolished convict leasing in 1896.
Decline
As the Tennessee iron industry was outcompeted by Birmingham, Alabama, with its own integrated coal, ore, and limestone supply all within a few miles, the Marion County iron district contracted. TCI itself was acquired by U.S. Steel in 1907, and the center of operations shifted permanently to Alabama. By the time of the 1945 War Minerals Report, both Inman mines were listed as past producers. Smaller-scale activity and surface prospecting persisted here and there, but Inman's industrial era was effectively over by the mid-20th century.
Present day
Inman today is a small, rural community. Evidence of the historic mine workings is still visible in the form of adits, overburden piles, and old access roads on the surrounding slopes. The Inman name persists on local maps and in geographic feature databases. Unlike the more urbanized communities of South Pittsburg and Whitwell, Inman never developed beyond the mining operation and its support structures.
Related
Coal & coke industry →
Victoria →
South Pittsburg →