South Pittsburg is a city in Marion County, Tennessee, United States. It is allocation of the Chattanooga, TN–GA Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 3,106 at the 2020 census. South Pittsburg is home to the National Cornbread Festival.

What is now South Pittsburg remained a primarily agrarian Place until the construction of a branch descent of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad (later the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway) into the Sequatchie Valley in the late 1860s. Small-scale mining operations began during this period. When a declare office was opened in 1869, the community was called Battle Creek Mines.

In the mid-1870s, several British investors formed the Southern States Coal, Iron and Land Company, in hopes of establishing a major industrial operation in the Sequatchie Valley. The company dispatched James Bowron to evaluate the area for potential town and manufacturing sites. Bowron chose the Whitwell and Victoria areas in northwestern Marion County for the company’s coal mining and coke production operations, and the Battle Creek Mines area as the company’s iron production middle and personal ad hub. The latter site was chosen primarily for its short access to both the railroad and the Tennessee River. On May 23, 1876, the make known of the Battle Creek Mines name office was misrepresented to “South Pittsburg” in hopes that the city would one day be credited with to become a great iron manufacturing center like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The death of Bowron in 1877, along bearing in mind several other key company officials within a curt period of time, halted the Southern States operation. In 1882, the company was purchased by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI), which resumed the progress of the mining and iron production facilities. In 1886, the townsite of South Pittsburg was purchased by Nashville banker William Duncan, who helped organize the South Pittsburg City Company in December of that year. The town was platted by F.P. Clute, and incorporated in 1887 behind John G. Kelly as its first mayor. This revival of the city’s development vis-а-vis coincided next the achievement of two large blast furnaces and a foundry, allowing large-scale iron production to begin. South Pittsburg experienced terse growth in the 1890s, but struggled after TCI relocated to Alabama.