Ghosts of Lone Rock — Stephen L. Garrett

GHOSTS OF LONE ROCK - A documentary in progress

Our film builds on two prior documentaries treating the topic of convict leasing. Slavery By Another Name (2012), a 90-minute documentary that came out on PBS, dealt with the broad contours of the system, while Ava DuVernay’s Thirteenth (2016) offered a brilliant analysis of how this history informs the injustice of mass incarceration in the present day. Ghosts of Lone Rock examines in depth the workings of a particular branch prison. We interview historians as well as descendants of those involved, follow the archeologist Camille Westmont into the field as her team unearths the remains of the stockade, and using state-of-the-art animation by Ed Bell, illustrate the moment when local free miners set the stockade on fire and released the convicts. We will follow Tennessee representative Raumesh Akbari as she and her team campaign for the passage of a November 2022 ballot initiative to change the language of the 13th amendment in the state constitution; the very amendment that created a legal loophole making convict leasing - slavery by another name - still legal to this day.

There was a vast fortune to be made in the years after the Civil War from the untapped coal veins of eastern Tennessee, and all that was needed to extract it was cheap source of labor. The owners of Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI) worked with the state legislature to introduce the convict leasing system, in which the company would house convicts (mostly African-American) at its private “branch” prisons and force them to work in the mines virtually for free. In fact, if a convict died, the company simply had the penitentiary send them another one. An added benefit for the company was the control this system allowed them to exert over free working-class population. TCI’s founder himself referred to convict leasing as “an effective club to hold over the heads of free laborers.” In the early 1890s, a furious set of wars broke out between the free miners and the company owners, as stockades were burnt to the ground, and convicts made their escape. The Lone Rock Stockade in Tracy City was the largest of these private prisons, and its story—one of great misery for many, and great profit for others—has not been told. Until now.

This sample was created for a Sept 10-11, 2021 conference organized by Rice University, called “Sugar Land and African American History – Convict Leasing and its Legacies in Current Scholarship, Education, and Activism.”

Behind the Scenes!

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In this second sample, we present Senator Akbari with transcribed prison records, and film her reaction to the stunning photograph of a captured convict at the Lone Rock Stockade, from Travis Turner’s collection.

We are thrilled that Camille Westmont and the Tennessee Convict Stockade project were featured in a national podcast from Reveal - Locked Up: The Prison Labor That Built Business Empires.

The podcast crew and a team of AP journalists reached out to us as they researched their story. We met them in Tennessee in Spring of 2022, and shared our research, interviewee contacts, and even helped them out with food and lodging suggestions in and around Grundy County, Tennessee!

Tennessee newspapers have also written excellent articles featuring this important story. You can read Tennessee Lookout’s take here, and the Sewanee Mountain Messenger’s version here.

You can listen to the Reveal podcast here: https://revealnews.org/podcast/locked-up-the-prison-labor-that-built-business-empires/

It is our intention to complete our film in late 2022 with the aim to release it in 2023. For inquiries and funding opportunities, please reach out via the contact page on this website.