With a sizable real estate portfolio, the company owned several Birmingham satellite towns, including Ensley, Fairfield, Docena, Edgewater and Bayview.

A Thomas O'Connor purchased the company in 1876 and expanded the business into iron manufacture in order to stimulate coke sales, building a blast furnace near Cowan.

Canny investments and the purchase of major competitors in 1888 and 1892 under the direction of financier Hiram Bond, TCI Corporate General Superintendent, saw the firm grow rapidly.

[6] The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company was one of the largest users of prison laborers, mostly Blacks convicted of petty crimes, as a method for paying fines.

E. H. Gary, president of U. S. Steel, agreed in principle to this transaction, yet argued that without careful political maneuvering the deal would be seen by Congress as an effort to create a monopoly and thereby encounter troublesome federal anti-trust litigation.

[13] In response to his concerns, Morgan sent Gary on an urgent mission to Washington that Sunday so that the deal might not be vetted by President Theodore Roosevelt himself before the stock exchange opened the next day.

Convinced by Gary that U. S. Steel only wished to purchase Moore and Schley's stock in order to inject liquidity into the firm and thereby shore up investor confidence in the wider economy, Roosevelt granted the transaction antitrust immunity in November 1907, a decision for which he was later derided by critics as a hypocrite.

Immediately following the merger, a venture was launched to create a new, larger TCI plant to the west of Ensley and at the center of a new company town, and so in 1910 work on the planned community of Corey, Alabama, began.

Several rolling mills were completed in 1917,[3] which produced ship materials for the nearby shipbuilding plants in Chickasaw, Alabama, in support of America's sudden entry into World War I.

[6] TCI's independence as a separate legal entity from its parent corporation ended in 1952, a century after the founding of the Sewanee Furnace Company, when it became the Tennessee Coal & Iron Division of U. S.

[3] The memory of the historic importance of TCI was not lost when a short book to celebrate the Tennessee Company's centenary was published by U. S. Steel in 1960: Biography of a Business.

[3] Stagnation and decline began in 1962 when a majority of the mines in the Birmingham region were closed[3] as domestic ores and coal were superseded by cheaper foreign products, especially from Venezuela.

[17] August 17, 2015, U. S. Steel President and CEO Mario Longhi announced, "We have determined that the permanent shut-down of the Fairfield Works blast furnace, steelmaking and most of the finishing operations is necessary."