09/01/2025
Story Time (we can’t promise how much of it is true)
Happy Labor Day! Today we celebrate with a good ole fashioned Tennessee style barbecue with friends and co-workers.
Tennessee laborers have been celebrating with barbecue for decades, just like this group of workers outside the 🚂 Chattanooga Choo Choo built between 1906 and 1909 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The latter days of construction were great testing grounds for our Tennessee style sauces. 🏗️
In the late 1800s through the early 1900s, Chattanooga stood tall as one of the South’s busiest crossroads for both industrial freight and passenger rail. With tracks buzzing and demand outpacing supply, construction began in 1906 on what would become Terminal Station—the grand gateway for trains rolling through the Tennessee Valley.
When the first train pulled into the new station on December 1, 1909, it opened the door to a golden age of travel. At its peak, nearly 50 trains a day steamed in and out, carrying everyone from local merchants to world leaders. Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt all passed through the grand arched doors.
But alongside the iron and smoke of locomotives came another story—the quiet hustle of a few clever boys out of Lynchburg. With Tennessee’s prohibition laws tightening and folks still thirsty for both flavor and fire, the Lynchburg Mule Company found a way to “season the rails.”
Crates marked “Fresh Ingredients” or “BBQ Sauce” rolled off wagons and onto trains bound for Chattanooga, Memphis, and beyond. The labels told part of the truth, sure, the Mule Company made sauces. Fine ones, too: Memphis Southern Style BBQ, 🍑 Nashville Hot Peach, and Smokey Mountain Mustard Style. But every now and then, a bottle or two carried something a little stronger than molasses and vinegar.
Stories spread of construction crews working on Terminal Station sneaking away during breaks, cracking open a crate, and finding themselves with more than enough “liquid motivation” 🥃 to get through another shift. Some swore the station bricks went up straighter and the rivets hammered tighter after a swig of Lynchburg’s special stock.
🐴 The Mule boys became legends along the rails, half businessmen, half tricksters, rolling their mules and wagons into Chattanooga under the cover of sauce-making respectability. Their goods flavored barbecues, lifted spirits, and kept the Choo Choo running with more than just coal and steel.
So while the history books say Terminal Station was built on sweat, stone, and steel, the Lynchburg folks know the truth: a little barbecue sauce and a lot of grit fueled the rails that made Chattanooga sing.
