Josephus C. Guild, Jr., ASCE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Conn_Guild

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."[2] In the 1890s, he designed the Lookout Mountain Incline Railway, which at the time of its construction was the steepest railway in the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Conn_Guild

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.

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https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/jo-conn-guild/

Chattanooga business leader Jo Conn Guild was an outspoken critic of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). He was born in 1887 in Chattanooga, the son of a prominent engineer. He attended Baylor School, the University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University, where he earned an engineering degree. He then spent four years working on Hales Bar Dam, a project begun by his now-deceased father. In 1913 Guild joined the Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company, which owned power rights to the Hales Bar facility. Two years later he became general manager of the firm.

In 1922 the Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company merged with the Chattanooga Railway and Light Company to form the Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Guild served as vice-president of the firm until 1933, when he was named the company's president. Under Guild's direction, TEPCO became one of the South's leading privately owned utilities, serving over one hundred thousand customers in nearly four hundred communities in Middle and East Tennessee, including the cities of Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga.

Guild's greatest challenge came in the 1930s with the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. A champion of privately owned power companies, Guild denounced the public utility as an unnecessary and unwarranted threat to free enterprise. He soon found a powerful ally in Wendell Willkie, then president of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, a giant utilities conglomerate. Together, Guild and Willkie waged a five-year legal battle against the TVA, challenging the constitutionality of the public utility in federal courts. The courts upheld the TVA act, however, and in January 1939, the United States Supreme Court dismissed their suit against the federal utility. A short time later, in August 1939, the TVA purchased TEPCO for $78.4 million.

Although TEPCO no longer existed, Guild retained control of the company's streetcar franchises in Chattanooga and Nashville, which he reorganized as the Southern Coach Lines. As president of this firm, he maintained the public transportation systems of these cities for several years and oversaw their conversion to bus service. He also remained active in Chattanooga's business community and served on the boards of many local corporations. He died in 1969 at the age of eighty-one after a colorful and controversial life.