"Friends Everywhere."
The two-word slogan of J. Allen Smith & Company has something to say not only about this Knoxville, Tenn., flour mill but about the railroad that has served it for three quarters of a century.
To make friends everywhere a business concern needs both quality products and the transportation to bring in raw materials and get finished goods to the potential customer.
Quality control at the milling company is thorough. Chemists and laboratory technicians run process tests in a miniature flour mill, make flour-by-flour samplings of the output of the big mills and of frequent test bakings to see that quality stays high.
Close to the center of Knoxville, Tenn., backed up to Southern's main line near the railway's passenger station, J. Allen Smith & Co., has produced flour and other grain products for nearly three-quarters of a century. Since moving to this location in 1885, the company has increased the size and capacity of its mill many fold. |
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Inbound and outbound rail transportation gets the same close attention from Southern.
Since the earliest days of the flour Company, a limited local wheat crop has kept the mill dependent on imports from other states. People knew the company then as the Knoxville City Mills and the railroad that served it as the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia.) Now the golden harvest from Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and states as far distant as Missouri, Kansas and Minnesota, goes into this Tennessee mill.
Cars of grain received by Southern on line or from Midwest connections are switched daily onto the mill siding. Daily, too, the railway moves out box cars of bagged flour and feed, and Air-Slide cars of flour in bulk.
J. Allen Smith & Co. sells flour and feed not only in the Knoxville area but throughout most of the Southeast.
The milling company and Southern Railway not only serve the same territory but share a common history of growth from small beginnings.
The man who gave the milling company his name (and a tradition of quality and fair dealing) first gained prominence in Knoxville business circles as a young grain and produce dealer and commission merchant.
Youngest of 10 children, J. Allen Smith was born at Elberton, Ga., in 1850. His father, a school teacher and a Methodist preacher, saw four sons put on the Confederate gray. Two of them were killed during the War Between the States.
After a boyhood shadowed by war (he was only 10 when the first shells arched into Fort Sumter) , young Smith left home to work and attend business school in Atlanta.
Bagged flour is loaded daily into box cars by fork-lift trucks, for rail delivery to the mill's customers in the Southeast. |
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Little is known now about his years in Atlanta but he must have worked and studied to good effect. For he arrived in Knoxville in the early 1870's with an amount of capital, which, though small, was, enough to establish the J. Allen Smith Wholesale Grain Company. And he made a success of the venture.
By 1882 he had prospered enough to take a share in the organization of the Knoxville City Mills Company. The capital investment was $30,000- a "shoestring start" even for that time-but the enterprise flourished.
Knoxville City Mills and the grain company were merged in 1888, with Mr. Smith as president of the combined company and milling its primary business. By 1905, J. Allen Smith & Co. was grossing nearly $2 million a year. In time it became one of the largest establishments of its kind in the Southeast.
J. Allen Smith's personal principles may have been a legacy from his minister father. From the beginning he made them his company's as well: no compromise with quality; honesty and fairness in dealing with employees and customers.
B. L. Driscoll, a old-time Southern Railway man who joined the milling' firm in 1915 when the founder was still president, recalls the scrupulous honesty that often exceeded normal business ethics.
Mr. Driscoll, now a vice-president of the firm, remembers particularly the case of the non-existent grain shipment.
A Baltimore grain broker issued fraudulent bills of lading, with drafts attached, indicating a shipment of wheat to J. Allen Smith & Co. A Knoxville bank accepted the drafts for payment, and was later reimbursed by the mill. No such shipment ever arrived. Though Mr. Smith was in no way at fault, he took it upon himself to pay the debt personally rather than have it show as a loss against his company.
Mr. Driscoll remembers his former boss as a softspoken, serious-minded man who seldom laughed aloud and never lost his temper.
One of the early users of this new type equipment, J. Allen Smith & Co. ships flour in bulk in Air-Slide cars. |
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But dishonesty and misrepresentation in any form stirred him to quiet anger and to action. When, for example, a few feed dealers around the turn of the century began adding ground corn cobs and corn shucks to their animal feed, the mill owner drafted a bill for the Tennessee state legislature outlawing such tampering. The bill passed.
In 1905 he joined other millers in an effort to make it illegal the adulteration of flour. But the problem was solved by the Pure Food and Drug Act passed by the United States Congress in 1906.
His interest in good business practices was matched by his civic interest. Contemporary newspaper accounts tell of his donation of $50,000 to the Knoxville Health Center. And he has been credited with helping establish an agricultural experiment station at the University of Tennessee.
J. Allen Smith's death in 1920 left the company in the hands of his only son. For 24 years Powell Smith carried on both the basic business policies of his father and the further expansion of the company.
By 1944 the plant was securely established as a major flour mill, with an output of more than 300,000 lbs. of flour daily - in contrast to the original daily production of less than 20,000 lbs.
Powell Smith's death the same year brought changes in the company's organization. Until that time the mill had been largely a family controlled business. Powell Smith left two daughters, but no sons to carry on the business. Stock ownership became more diversified, but the basic policies remained.
The milling company's major postwar expansion came in 1952. A new building, 100 feet square and five stories high, was built to house machinery that practically doubled the plant's capacity. Daily capacity increased to 600,000 lbs. of flour, 120,000 lbs. of corn meal and 250,000 lbs. of millfeed.
At the same time, more bulk storage tanks were installed to enable the plant to do all packing and loading during daylight flours.
Equipped with modern machinery, linked with suppliers and customers by modern rail service, today
J. Allen Smith & Co. produces and distributes over a wide territory several brands of flour, and substantial quantities of corn meal and millfeed. Some of the Knoxville firm's products go to Latin America, Europe and the Far East.
"White Lily" is by all odds the favorite J. Allen Smith & Co. product. It's the mill's highest grade flour -with "friends" far beyond the boundaries of the company's sales territory in the Southeast.
Southern Railway and its predecessor line, the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, had a part in adding the word "everywhere." For more than 75 years, steel rails have led out from the Knoxville flour mill's loading platforms in every direction - to an increasing number of customers.