| Summary: | The Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Company is another company that the Ashcraft family of Florence either owned or had a stake in. In 1897, a year before he founded the Florence Cotton Oil Company, Lee Ashcraft founded and incorporated the Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Company. At the time of incorporation, the Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Company had an initial capital stock of fifty thousand dollars, before increasing to one hundred thousand by 1903. The Fertilizer Company was well known for making custom-made guano fertilizers for customers if the fertilizers were needed for a special purpose. Some of the various guano fertilizers they produced were named King Cotton Grower, Three Link, Ashcraft Special, Cotton Seed Meal and Bone, Tiger Cotton Grower, Tiger Guano, Tiger Potash Guano, and Blood and Bone.
The factory’s location was on Cherry Street in Sweetwater. On the first day of operation, Lee Ashcraft and an unnamed helper produced eleven bags of fertilizer together. From 1897 to 1904, Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Company under Ashcraft produced nineteen different fertilizers at 15,000 tons annually. Lee Ashcraft owned the Fertilizer Company until 1909 when the International Mineral Corporation (IMC) bought the company from Ashcraft. The Fertilizer Company became the oldest running fertilizer plant for IMC in the country into the early 2000s. As of today, it is still in operation under the name of Agrium, Inc. in the same area of Sweetwater right next to Veterans Drive and the Patton Island Bridge.
The original factory for the Fertilizer Company stretches back to before the Civil War when the facility the fertilizer plant occupied was a flouring mill for Florence. Unbelievably, the three-story building that existed in 1897 when Lee Ashcraft began the business was not burned to the ground by Union forces in during the Civil War. So the original Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Company factory building could trace its industrial genealogy back to before the Civil War.
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