Edward Jackson Sanford (November 23, 1831 – October 27, 1902) was an American manufacturing tycoon and financier, active primarily in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the late 19th century.

Although many people fled Knoxville during the city's cholera outbreak of 1854, Sanford stayed behind to help care for the sick and dying.

[3] At the outset of the Civil War in November 1861, Sanford helped fellow Unionist William Rule sneak out of Confederate-occupied Knoxville to carry messages to newspaper editor William G. Brownlow, who was in hiding in the mountains.

[5] In 1862 Sanford fled to Kentucky to join the Union Army but fell ill before he could enlist (Sanford's account of his escape to Kentucky was later published as an appendix in Thomas William Humes's The Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee).

In 1891, an uprising known as the Coal Creek War erupted when TCMC attempted to replace its free miners with convict laborers.

Jenkins for the uprising,[8] he nevertheless supported the use of convict labor as a means to keep regional coal companies competitive.

[3] In October 1882 the bank's first president, Thomas O'Connor, was killed in a notorious shootout in downtown Knoxville.

In 1889, he and his long-time associate Charles McClung McGhee founded the Lenoir City Company with plans to establish such a town.

[3] During the same period, he advocated the establishment of a public school system in Knoxville and served as the president of the city's Board of Education in the early 1880s.