The Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. was a reorganization of an earlier concern of the same name located in Alabama. The reorganization brought into control of the company new and powerful interests, and these spent a good deal of money in improving the plants, so that, about the beginning of 1907, it was pointed to as a probable important competitor of the Corporation. It was also considered as the nucleus for a possible merger of the steel-making concerns of the South such as would be able to cut severely into the Corporation’s business. Not long before the panic broke the company secured an order from the railroads controlled by the late E. H. Harriman for 150,000 tons of steel rails and it was supposed by some that the loss of this order had caused considerable worriment to the heads of the Steel Corporation--which doubtless it did. Then came the panic, and when its dust cleared away the Tennessee company was a subsidiary of the “Steel Trust.” The sequence has served to lend plausibility to the charges made against the Corporation in connection with the purchase. But a full recital of the events bearing on the deal tends to throw a different light on the matter, and an attempt to set down the more important of these details will be made here. [Illustration: Modern Coal Mining by Machinery] Emphasis has been laid on the Harriman order, particularly because the Tennessee company had contracted to supply the lines controlled by the great railroad magnate with the new open-hearth steel rail, then coming into popular favor with the railroad experts and which to-day are used almost exclusively by the larger transportation systems. It has been alleged that the Corporation was very desirous of adding to its properties the plants making this new kind of steel rail and getting immediate control of their manufacture. The facts are that the southern company did not make a pure open-hearth rail, its steel being made by a combination of the Bessemer and open-hearth processes, and the Corporation at the time was engaged in building its new plant at Gary, a plant which was to include a large rail mill to make open-hearth rails exclusively. When the Corporation took charge of the Tennessee properties it was found that the company’s rail mill was being operated at a loss of nearly $4 a ton. Further, a very large percentage of the rails which had been supplied the Harriman roads before the transfer of the properties proved defective and the new management had to bear the loss of replacing these.