Josephus Conn Guild, Jr. (December 15, 1887–June 26, 1969) was an American businessman and engineer from
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Chattanooga ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Hamilton County, Tennessee, United States. Located along the Tennessee River bordering Georgia, it also extends into Marion County on its western end. With a population of 181,099 in 2020, ...
. As president of the
Tennessee Electric Power Company
The Chattanooga and Tennessee Electric Power Company was formed in 1905 by Josephus C. Guild, Charles E. James and Anthony N. Brady to produce hydroelectric power and improving the navigation of the Tennessee River.
Josephus Guild, a young engin ...
(TEPCO), he became one of the staunchest and most outspoken opponents of the newly formed
Tennessee Valley Authority
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina ...
(TVA) in the 1930s. With the help of attorney
Wendell Willkie
Wendell Lewis Willkie (born Lewis Wendell Willkie; February 18, 1892 – October 8, 1944) was an American lawyer, corporate executive and the 1940 Republican nominee for President. Willkie appealed to many convention delegates as the Republican ...
, Guild waged a legal battle that questioned the constitutionality of TVA, culminating in a
U.S. Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
case dismissal that forced TEPCO to sell its assets to the new federal agency.
[Timothy Ezzell]
Jo Conn Guild
''Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture'', 2002. Retrieved: 20 August 2009.
Working for his father's
Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company as a young engineer in the early 1900s, Guild helped build
Hales Bar Dam
Hales Bar Dam was a hydroelectric dam once located on the Tennessee River in Marion County, Tennessee, United States. The Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company began building the dam on October 17, 1905, and completed it on November 11t ...
, the first dam on the main channel of the
Tennessee River
The Tennessee River is the largest tributary of the Ohio River. It is approximately long and is located in the southeastern United States in the Tennessee Valley. The river was once popularly known as the Cherokee River, among other names, ...
and the first
hydroelectric
Hydroelectricity, or hydroelectric power, is electricity generated from hydropower (water power). Hydropower supplies one sixth of the world's electricity, almost 4500 TWh in 2020, which is more than all other renewable sources combined and ...
dam on a navigable channel in the United States. After his father's death, he helped the company expand, eventually merging it with several other companies to form TEPCO in 1922.
Guild served as vice-president of TEPCO throughout the 1920s,
and by the time he was named president in 1933, the company was the state's largest electric power company, controlling plants such as Hales Bar Dam, Ocoee dams
No. 1 and
No. 2,
Blue Ridge Dam
Blue Ridge Dam is a hydroelectric dam on the Toccoa River in Fannin County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the uppermost of four dams on the Toccoa/Ocoee River owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The dam impounds the Blue ...
, and
Great Falls Dam. Although eventually forced to sell TEPCO's power division, Guild continued operating the company's
streetcar
A tram (called a streetcar or trolley in North America) is a rail vehicle that travels on tramway tracks on public urban streets; some include segments on segregated right-of-way. The tramlines or networks operated as public transport are ...
holdings, eventually transforming these holdings into the Southern Coach bus lines.
Biography
Early life
Guild was born in Chattanooga in 1887, the son of Josephus Conn Guild, Sr. (1862–1907) and Mary Orr. Guild's grandfather, George Guild, served as mayor of
Nashville
Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the seat of Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the most populous city in the state, 21st most-populous city in the U.S., and the ...
in the early 1890s, and his namesake great-grandfather
Josephus Conn Guild (1802–1883) was a prominent
Sumner County judge and author. The name "Conn" was the maiden name of Guild's great-great-grandmother (Judge Guild's mother), Elizabeth Conn. Guild's father, who moved to Chattanooga in 1885, has been described as "the most capable engineer of his day."
In the 1890s, he designed the
Lookout Mountain Incline Railway
The Lookout Mountain Incline Railway is a inclined plane funicular railway leading to the top of Lookout Mountain from the historic St. Elmo neighborhood of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Passengers are transported from St. Elmo's Station at the base, ...
, which at the time of its construction was the steepest railway in the world.
[John Trotwood Moore (editor) and Austin Foster, ''Tennessee the Volunteer State, 1769–1923'' (Nashville, Tenn.: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1923), pp. 66-73.]
Guild attended the
Baylor School
Baylor School, commonly called Baylor, is a private, coeducational college-preparatory school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Founded in 1893, the school currently sits atop a 690-acre campus and enrolls students in grades 6-12, including boarding stu ...
(his father was a friend of the school's founder) from 1897 to 1905, after which he received technical training at the
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United S ...
and studied engineering at
Vanderbilt.
In 1904, Guild accompanied his father and his father's business partner Charles James to what would eventually be the Hales Bar Dam site, where they met with
Nicholas Brady (son of New York financier
Anthony N. Brady) and utilities expert
Thomas E. Murray to secure funding for the dam's construction. Guild, Sr. and James established the Chattanooga & Tennessee River Power Company that same year to oversee the dam's construction.
[Gilbert Govan, ''The Chattanooga Country, 1540–1962: from Tomahawks to TVA'' (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), pp. 445-8, 456-460.]
TEPCO and TVA
After receiving his engineering degree in 1909, Guild joined his late father's company and aided in the completion of Hales Bar Dam. The dam went into operation in November 1913, after which the title was turned over to the federal government, with Chattanooga & Tennessee Power retaining rights to the power generation profits for 99 years.
In 1915, Guild was named Chattanooga & Tennessee Power's general manager, and in 1922 he helped oversee the merger of several Tennessee power firms to form the Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO). The merger included Chattanooga & Tennessee Power, the Tennessee Power Company (which had built
Great Falls Dam on the
Caney Fork
The Caney Fork River is a river that flows through central Tennessee in the United States, draining a substantial portion of the southwestern Cumberland Plateau and southeastern Highland Rim regions. It is a major tributary of the Cumberland River ...
in 1917), and the
E.W. Clark & Co. subsidiaries Chattanooga Railway & Light (which controlled Chattanooga's street lights and street cars) and the East Tennessee Power Company (which had built Ocoee dams 1 and 2 on the
Ocoee River
The Toccoa River and Ocoee River are the names in use for a single river that flows northwestward through the southern Appalachian Mountains of the southeastern United States. It is a tributary of the Hiwassee River, which it joins in Polk Coun ...
).
In the 1920s, with Guild as its vice president, TEPCO expanded rapidly, eventually acquiring control of 45 Tennessee power and utilities firms.
Blue Ridge Dam
Blue Ridge Dam is a hydroelectric dam on the Toccoa River in Fannin County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the uppermost of four dams on the Toccoa/Ocoee River owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The dam impounds the Blue ...
, which was advanced enough to require just six employees for its operations, was completed in the early 1930s by a TEPCO subsidiary. In 1933, Guild was selected as TEPCO's president.
As part of
President Roosevelt's New Deal
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...
initiatives, the federal government created the TVA in 1933. TVA was given oversight of the entire Tennessee River watershed and the power to use
eminent domain
Eminent domain (United States, Philippines), land acquisition (India, Malaysia, Singapore), compulsory purchase/acquisition (Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, United Kingdom), resumption (Hong Kong, Uganda), resumption/compulsory acquisition (Austr ...
to seize privately owned dams in the watershed. Guild vehemently opposed the agency's creation. In 1936, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of TVA in the
''Ashwander'' case, TEPCO and several other private firms sued TVA, challenging the agency's constitutionality. The private utilities were represented by
Wendell Willkie
Wendell Lewis Willkie (born Lewis Wendell Willkie; February 18, 1892 – October 8, 1944) was an American lawyer, corporate executive and the 1940 Republican nominee for President. Willkie appealed to many convention delegates as the Republican ...
(Willkie's
Commonwealth & Southern Corporation The Commonwealth & Southern Corporation was a New York City-based United States electric utility holding company. The company was incorporated in 1929, and it initially contained three other electric utility holding companies: the Commonwealth Power ...
owned interests in several of the power firms) and
Newton D. Baker
Newton Diehl Baker Jr. (December 3, 1871 – December 25, 1937) was an American lawyer, Georgist,Noble, Ransom E. "Henry George and the Progressive Movement." The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 8, no. 3, 1949, pp. 259–269. w ...
, while TVA was represented by attorneys
James Lawrence Fly
James Lawrence "Larry" Fly (February 22, 1898 – January 6, 1966) was an American lawyer, famous as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and, later, director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He helped inaugurate standards fo ...
and John Lord O'Brian. The federal district court ruled in favor of the private utilities, but the decision was overturned by the Court of Appeals in early 1938. The private utilities appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which dismissed the suit in January 1939, claiming the utilities lacked
standing
Standing, also referred to as orthostasis, is a position in which the body is held in an ''erect'' ("orthostatic") position and supported only by the feet. Although seemingly static, the body rocks slightly back and forth from the ankle in the s ...
.
On August 15, 1939, TEPCO sold its assets to TVA for $78 million.
Later life
Guild retained control of TEPCO's Chattanooga street car division, which he reorganized as Southern Coach Lines in 1941. The company operated street cars until 1946, when it focused on bus travel. Guild retired as company president in 1961.
[John Shearer]
Remembering Jo Conn Guild
''The Chattanoogan.com'', 2008-05-06. Retrieved: 2009-08-20. The company was purchased by the
Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority
The Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) is the mass transit provider for Chattanooga, Tennessee and its vicinity.
Public transportation first appeared on the streets of Chattanooga in 1875, utilizing horse-drawn trollies ...
in 1973.
Guild owned a large house on
Lookout Mountain
Lookout Mountain is a mountain ridge located at the northwest corner of the U.S. state of Georgia, the northeast corner of Alabama, and along the southeastern Tennessee state line in Chattanooga. Lookout Mountain was the scene of the 18th-centu ...
, and even in his later years, it was not uncommon to see Guild driving down the mountain in one of his custom-made sports cars. Guild also owned a cattle and hog farm near
Columbia, Tennessee
Columbia is a city in and the county seat of Maury County, Tennessee. The population was 41,690 as of the 2020 United States census. Columbia is included in the Nashville metropolitan area.
The self-proclaimed "mule capital of the world," Colum ...
, where he cured hams and sausages using old family recipes. Guild married his first wife, Sarah Nichols, in 1912, and they had one daughter, Virginia (1915–2001). Guild died on June 26, 1969, and is buried in the Forest Hills Cemetery.
References
External links
Jo Conn Guild Collection of Tennessee Electric Power Company Records, 1933—1939— Tennessee State Library and Archives finding aid
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guild, Joconn
People from Chattanooga, Tennessee
Tennessee Valley Authority
Businesspeople from Tennessee
1887 births
1969 deaths
Baylor School alumni
20th-century American businesspeople