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Tennessee: Documentary chronicles coke ovens-bluegrass connection

By: Ben Benton
(Contact)

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Charli Wyatt
Carson Camp

DUNLAP, Tenn. — A documentary video premiering tonight at the Coke Ovens Museum here chronicles the museum’s 23-year transformation from a garbage dump to a site on the National Register of Historic Places.

The video, “Coke Ovens Slaves: The Story of a Bluegrass Festival,” is the work of Dunlap resident Charli Wyatt, a master’s degree candidate at the Indiana University School of Journalism.

Carson Camp, the historian at the Coke Ovens Museum and member of the Sequatchie Valley Historical Society, said the video documents bluegrass musicians’ impact on the project.

“It basically just tells the story in 30 minutes of what’s over 20 years’ worth of things that have happened,” Mr. Camp said.

For more than two decades, local bluegrass musicians supported the museum with fundraising music festivals and their own hands, he said. The Coke Ovens Museum would have been a struggling effort without that support, he said.

“They’ve been there since the beginning, and it’s just amazing they’ve stayed true to their calling,” he said. “With other types of music, it would have been hard to get together.”

The museum gets more than 90 percent of its operational funds from an annual June bluegrass festival, he said.

The 77-acre park contains the remains of 268 beehive coke ovens built in the early 1900s. The ovens were used to convert mountain coal into industrial coke, a product used to smelt iron ore.

A ceremony planned later this month will dedicate a memorial to those musicians.

Ms. Wyatt said the video started as a way to fulfill requirements of a school project, but she recognized the importance of the history she was documenting.

“When I got into actually interviewing people and talking to them about it, the whole story behind the coke ovens and the volunteers kind of came out,” she said. “It was interesting to me how bluegrass musicians and bluegrass music were woven into all that.”

Bluegrass music has a connection with history and folklore, and the museum links local people with the Sequatchie Valley’s coal mining past, she said.

Ms. Wyatt said the connection was a natural fit for the video.

Much of the footage was shot during the Coke Ovens Bluegrass Festival in June, but some of it is video recorded by Mr. Camp in the 1980s, she said.

“It really comes from the heart of the community,” she said.

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