NOTES FROM "History of Roane County" by BISHOP, p. 238
REEDY's FIRST STEAM SAWMILL EXPLODED, KILLING FIVE MEN

This happened on a fatal day in the year 1866. The names of these victims were Robert Blosser, William T. Cain, Hawkins Boggs, Samuel Wyatt, and a man named Hardway. The first four named were sons of pioneer families, each having a wife and children. These men had purchased a new sixty or ninety horsepower portable sawmill, the first ever seen in that place - the first circular saw ever brought there.

It had been all set up, all its parts assembled, and had been sawing lumber; the men were all inexperienced in the use of steam power and many of the contrivances by which the power was made and controlled. At that time, water was kept in the boiler by means of the old-fashioned suction and lever pumps, one of which was mounted fast to the side of the boiler and operated by a wheel and crank by a belt from the great drive wheel. The mechanism of the pump had been going in the usual movements, but the men were unaware that the pump was giving the boiler no water and had not been doing so for a long enough time for the boiler to get very hot.

This is the last known information as to how it all happened, except which was seen from a distance, for all near it were killed in a terrific explosion which jarred the hills to their foundations. The whole mill hurled itself into fragments. It stood on the creek bank several hundred yards from the foot of the hill; the one largest solid piece was the big belt and flywheel of cast iron. This ran across the intervening level bottom land with the speed of a cannonball and stopped against a large sugar tree at the foot of the hill, where it lay for some years - four or five years after the explosion.