On this day in 1932 the head of the Tennessee Department of Finance and Taxation, George R. Dempster of Knoxville, was elected chairman of the Tennessee Great Smoky Mountains Park Commission, set up to co-ordinate with the federal government in the establishment of the park in Tennessee.
Dempster wasn’t just a bureaucrat in Nashville, however. He was a long-time Democratic politician in Knoxville, holding the offices of city manager and mayor several times and was a political foe of Republican Cas Walker, of supermarket fame.
But he’s probably better known for an invention.
George Dempster and his brothers had a construction business that went under at the start of the Great Depression. Undaunted, they formed a machinery company, with which they produced a new product: a large waste container that could be mechanically emptied into a garbage truck by machinery attached to it. And it was given a name: the Dempster Dumpster, the granddaddy of all the dumpsters you see today.
