Growing up on a strawberry farm, Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey learned early the value of planting seeds and waiting for the fruit to grow.

On Tuesday, Mr. Ramsey tasted the fruit of a longtime dream to grow new industry on a former Army munitions plant site when Volkswagen AG announced plans to build a $1 billion auto plant here.

“To all those naysayers who doubted what we were doing, this is an especially great day,” a teary-eyed Mr. Ramsey told hundreds of cheering political and business leaders gathered at a celebration in the Hunter Museum of American Art.

Chattanooga’s success in landing Volkswagen involved hundreds of workers over the past seven months, according to Chamber of Commerce Vice President Trevor Hamilton.

The dream began for Mr. Ramsey and others in the 1970s when the U.S. Army quit making TNT at the Volunteer Site, which now holds the Enterprise South industrial park where VW will build. Cleaning up the site, laying roads and utilities and waiting for a major industry at the refurbished TNT plant has required tens of millions of dollars and more patience than most politicians possess, according to Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield.

“I think this is the best possible economic development that Chattanooga could have hoped for,” he said. “It shows that we were right to hold out for the right business and not just break up this great site for the quick or easier sale.”

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., a former Chattanooga mayor who helped designate the site as Enterprise South while at City Hall, entertained VW representatives three times at his Riverview home over the past three months during Chattanooga’s recruitment campaign.

Mr. Corker lavished praise on Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen for his willingness to set aside up to $100 million for economic development program this year, despite other budget cuts.

In a bipartisan spirit Tuesday, Gov. Bredesen returned the favor to the state’s two U.S. senators, Sens. Corker and Lamar Alexander, also a Republican, and to Mr. Ramsey, the Republican mayor in Hamilton County. The governor said Mr. Ramsey, Mr. Corker and Mr. Littlefield all pushed for a major manufacturer at Enterprise South to help gain the maximum economic benefit from the industrial site.

Gov. Bredesen praised Sen. Alexander, one of his gubernatorial predecessors, as “the father of Tennessee’s automotive industry” for helping recruit Nissan to Smyrna, Tenn., and General Motors to Spring Hill, Tenn., in the 1980s, spawning Tennessee’s growing automotive industry.

Sen. Alexander said Volkswagen was drawn to Chattanooga by the same forces that brought Nissan and GM’s Saturn plant to Tennessee a generation ago.

“We have a central location, we are a right-to-work state and we have one of the best four-lane highway systems in the country,” he said. “I think Chattanooga was a plum ready to be picked by the right automotive company.”

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