Smoky Mountain & Atlantic Railroad

The Smoky Mountain & Altantic Railroad was a railroad company and the predecessor of the Knoxville & Asheville Railroad.

History
The SM&A began amongst the ashes of the Knoxville & Eastern Railroad, which was heavily destroyed during the American Civil War from April 12th, 1861 to May 9th, 1865. An investor by the name of Jeremiah Mack bought up all of the stock of the K&E and reorganized as the Knox County & Smoky Mountain Central Railroad (later renamed the Smoky Mountain & Atlantic Railroad). His first move as the railroad's president was to expand the railroad into the mountains.

By 1870, the SM&A had extended east towards Crosby where it connected to several logging operations. By the late 1880s, it had connected with the Richmond & Danville Railroad at Del Rio, Tennessee.

In 1894, the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia Railroad and the Richmond & Danville Railroad merged to create the Southern Railway. Following the merger, the new company began swallowing up its smaller competitors to expand their empire. The SM&A was targeted and the Southern attempted to buy them out in order to get a shorter route from Asheville to Knoxville instead of going northwest towards Morristown and then southwest to Knoxville. However no matter how many times the Southern tried to buy out the SM&A, they never succeeded.

It was because of these attempted takeovers that Jeremiah Mack decided to expand his railroad eastward again towards Asheville and beyond. In 1902, after getting several investors, the SM&A began construction to build east into the Great Smoky Mountains. However by the beginning of 1904, funds were beginning to run out and a workers strike derailed this plan. By the end of 1904, construction only got as far as a few miles from the Tennessee/North Carolina state border. With that the railroad had to declare bankruptcy. In January of 1905, the SM&A was put up for auction. After a furious betting battle, it seemed that the Southern Railway would finally swallow up the SM&A, but at the last second, an eager SM&A employee named Joseph T.C. Hartford, outbid the Southern by $500.00 and the SM&A became his railroad and was renamed the Knoxville & Asheville Railroad Company.