"To hell with the ET&WNC, we'll start our own railroad!"
Those words were spoken in anger by Lewis Gasteinger, general manager of the newly formed Pittsburgh Lumber Company in Carter County, Tennessee, to William Flinn, president of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania construction firm of Booth & Flinn, which had recently, in 1909, purchased 12,00 acres of virgin-timber land in the Dennis Cove area of northeastern Tennessee.
The lumber company needed a way to take the finished wood to market. They approached a local railroad called the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina (aka "Tweetsie"), seeking to build a spur from the firm's sawmill, located about one-half mile east of the Carter County village of Hampton.
No satisfactory arrangement, however, could be agreed upon. So the Pittsburgh Lumber Company decided to build its own railroad. Incorporated in April 1910, the railroad ran from Elizabethton to Laban, Tennessee, a distance of 14.9 miles, the mainline mostly following the Laurel Fork of the Doe River.