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Concept
Jo Conn Guild
Summary
Josephus Conn Guild, Jr. (December 15, 1887–June 26, 1969) was an American businessman and engineer from Chattanooga, Tennessee. As president of the Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO), he became one of the staunchest and most outspoken opponents of the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s. With the help of attorney Wendell Willkie, Guild waged a legal battle that questioned the constitutionality of TVA, culminating in a U.S. Supreme Court case dismissal that forced TEPCO to sell its assets to the new federal agency.
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, the first dam on the main channel of the Tennessee River and the first hydroelectric 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, and Great Falls Dam. Although eventually forced to sell TEPCO's power division, Guild continued operating the company's streetcar holdings, eventually transforming these holdings into the Southern Coach bus lines.
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 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, which at the time of its construction was the steepest railway in the world.
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