Jellico, Tennessee

Jellico gets its unusual name from a plant, not a person. The Angelica herb grows wild across the Cumberland Mountains here, and miners came to call the high-quality bituminous seam they found in the area Jellico Coal, a corruption of the plant's name. When the town was founded in eighteen seventy-eight as Smithburg, it changed its name to Jellico in eighteen eighty-three the moment the Louisville and Nashville Railroad came through, tying its identity directly to the coal that would define it.

By eighteen eighty-four local mines were already shipping one hundred twenty-five thousand tons a year. By nineteen twelve output peaked at over one point eight million tons annually. The boom brought saloons, union organizers, and labor unrest to these mountain slopes.

Coal's decline left Jellico as a small city pressed between the ridges, just south of the Kentucky border on Interstate Seventy-Five.