From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Chattanooga Rebound

Chattanooga Rebound Itook Anita Ebersole’s advice about traveling from Ducktown to Chattanooga, even though it made no sense at the time. Anita sent me an e-mail saying: Ducktown is approximately 70 miles from Chattanooga. Due to the beautiful scenery which you will want to slow down to admire, it will take you about an hour and a half to two hours. Anita is an aide to Chattanooga’s mayor. I thought she was being very conservative about the travel time. With over half of the trip on four-lane highway, averaging thirty-five to forty miles an hour seemed awfully slow. But she was right. It’s not just the scenery that causes the slow pace, but the traffic on the four-lane portion of the trip. Once I got to the four-lane roads, I thought traffic to Chattanooga would move faster, but it didn’t. Even though it’s not a big city, Chattanooga traffic jams must be fairly common occurrences. It’s Tennessee’s fourthlargest city—only a little larger than it was sixty years ago and just slightly larger than Neyland Stadium’s seating capacity. One reason for traffic problems is Chattanooga’s geography. It’s located on a 180-degree bend in the Tennessee River. You have to cross bridges to get almost anywhere, and bridges tend to delay traffic. Also, Chattanooga is nestled in a valley along the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and the combination of bridges and hills is particularly brutal on the pace of travel. 146 The hills surrounding Chattanooga are famous to Civil War buffs: Signal Mountain, Missionary Ridge, and, of course, Lookout Mountain. Geography and the fact that it was the Confederacy’s railroad center made Chattanooga strategically important. A number of significant battles occurred here during the war. After the Civil War, Chattanooga rebounded, quickly becoming the center of southern manufacturing. A number of Yankees aided Chattanooga’s re-development when they returned after the war to make their fortunes. Iron foundries and furniture factories located in Chattanooga, and it soon became known as the “Dynamo of Dixie.” But neither relocated Yankees nor new industrial concerns gave Chattanooga its biggest boost. A newfangled soft drink sparked Chattanooga. In the early twentieth century, two young Chattanooga lawyers took a train to Atlanta and convinced the owner of Coca-Cola to sell them the national rights to bottle Coca-Cola. Asa Candler, the developer of Coca-Cola, didn’t place much faith in their production method. So he sold the bottling rights for a nominal sum to these two young Chattanoogans and kept the syrup-making part of the business. As a result of that single transaction, Coca-Cola created more millionaires in Chattanooga per capita than it did in Atlanta. Boosted by CocaCola bottling wealth, Chattanooga’s economy matured during the first half of the twentieth century as a diverse center of banking and insurance as well as the manufacturing center of the South. Throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s, highly industrialized Chattanooga was an economic anomaly in the South. Chattanooga consistently ranked among the ten most industrialized cities of America along with the likes of Allentown, Pennsylvania; Detroit, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana. When America’s industrial and manufacturing sectors faltered in the 1970s, Chattanooga slid from its perch as one of the most vibrant southern cities. Even though it was weakening, Chattanooga’s industrial base created another problem: pollution. In 1969, Chattanooga was declared the country’s “dirtiest city.” Chattanooga was so dirty that people often drove with their lights on during the day so they could see through the haze. The nearby hills were not visible from downtown, and office workers 147 often changed soot-stained white shirts during the day. During the 1970s and early ’80s, Chattanooga lost jobs and residents at a fairly steady rate. Its economic prospects were about as good as its air quality. But Chattanooga avoided the fate of the other cities like Allentown, Detroit, and Gary and reinvented itself as a vibrant small city. How did it avoid being a southern version of Gary or Allentown? What changed its fortunes? How did Chattanooga come out of its free fall? These were the questions I had for the mayor of Chattanooga, Ron Littlefield. Mayor Littlefield isn’t a native; he came to Chattanooga in the late 1960s from Georgia (by way of Auburn University). In other words...