Alcoa, Tennessee: The Company That Built Its Own City
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
The Cherokee people called this river valley home for centuries, establishing a capital at Chota and a village at Chilhowee just a few miles from here along the Little Tennessee River. American settlers pushed them out, and by eighteen ninety-five Blount County was logging the hardwood forests with steam-powered mills.
In nineteen nine, the Aluminum Company of America began quietly buying up riparian rights along the Little Tennessee, hunting for cheap hydroelectric power. They chose North Maryville as their smelter site in nineteen thirteen, then did something extraordinary: they incorporated the community themselves, naming it Alcoa, and chartered it as Tennessee's first planned industrial city in nineteen nineteen. The company built hundreds of homes, a hospital, schools, and parks.
For decades the company literally ran the town. It controlled zoning, utilities, and housing. Only in nineteen seventy-nine did Alcoa residents vote to fully separate city governance from corporate ownership. The aluminum still pours here today, and the city still bears the company's name.
