 Refugees poured into Nashville during the war, because jobs were plentiful in the depots, warehouses and hospitals serving the war effort, and furthermore the city was much safer place than the countryside.Unionists and Confederate sympathizers both flooded in, as did free blacks and escaped slaves, and businessmen from the North.There was little heavy industry in the South but the Western Iron District in Middle Tennessee was the largest iron producer in the Confederacy in 1861.