Alfred was born on July 16, 1845 near Winchester, Franklin County, Tennessee, United States. He was the eldest son of James Keith and Eliza Herndon (Green) Shook.
The Shooks, of German descent, had moved Westward before 1800 and finally settled in Middle Tennessee; the Greens were more recent comers from Virginia. Alfred grew up on his parents' farm.
He attended the country school.
Shook joined the Confederate cavalry in June 1862 but his military career was cut short when, in February 1863, he was wounded and captured at Fort Donelson. Held as a prisoner in the North until the end of the war, he returned to Tennessee in January 1866.
Through an uncle, he was soon placed in charge of the Tennessee Coal & Railroad Company's store at Tracy City, where he rapidly worked his way to a position of responsibility in the company. The mineral resources of the South were looked upon as a possible means of economic recovery from the effects of the Civil War and attracted many an enterprising Southerner from the impoverished agricultural districts. Shook, like his older associates, engaged in coal mining without any scientific training, but his capabilities were recognized by the new manager of the company, James C. Warner, who appointed him superintendent in 1868.
The growth of the company's business during the seventies, however, justified a venture into the manufacture of coke and convinced Shook that the future of the enterprise would be assured by utilizing this fuel in the company's furnaces. Under his management the Sewanee Furnace was built at Cowan, Tennessee, in 1881, and the following year the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, as it was now called, absorbed a rival English concern, The Southern States Coal, Iron & Land Company, operating a furnace near Chattanooga.
Shook as general manager until 1886 was in direct touch with both the metallurgical and the accounting problems of the business. As the business was expanded and the stock increased to $10, 000, 000, the control passed from the hands of the Tennessee group to speculators on the New York Exchange, and a reorganization early in 1886 cost Shook his position.
At the critical moment, however, industrial affairs in Birmingham, Alabama, worked to his advantage and transferred the principal activity of the Tennessee Company to that city. The Pratt Coal & Iron Company of Enoch Ensley, representing the largest iron interests of that region, was suddenly brought under the control of the Tennessee company by Shook and his Tennessee associates, who enlisted enough capital to secure options previously issued on the Pratt corporation. The Tennessee company, with its prestige so suddenly enhanced, underwent another reorganization, and Shook was reinstated as general manager.
Closely associated with Ensley now, he worked to carry out the latter's dream of a new industrial city near Birmingham, and in 1889 the fourth up-to-date iron furnace went into blast. His connection with the company was almost continuous from the time of its revival in 1866 until 1901. He died in Nashville in his seventy-eighth year.
Alfred Montgomery Shook headed Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company for more than 35 years, he mastered the intricacies of the blast furnace and saved the company many a dollar in operating expenses. No one than he contributed more in sound judgment and able management to establishing its preeminence in the Southern iron and steel industry. The school which he built and furnished at Tracy City at a cost of $40, 000 is but one example of his widespread benefactions.
Shook married Teresa Estill on July 17, 1871, and had five children.
