The Full Story of the Waterwheel on Lyons Bend

My Dear Mr. S:

Creekside mills were the hydro power of other generations, a semi-dependable energy source hereabouts a century and a half before TVA arrived to do something similar on a mammoth scale. Hydroelectric dams are waterwheels without the charm.

For most of the 19th century, First, Second, and Third Creeks were churning with water-powered mills. You can still see some surviving waterwheels here and there. Some of them were classic grist mills, once used for grinding grain. Some were power generators, useful in the early days of electricity when you could buy electrical appliances downtown, but if you lived outside of the city, didn't have any way to plug it in. (Having a nice house in the country, and plenty of money to buy the latest appliances, but nothing to plug them into, was a sad dilemma for our suburban affluent.) The ruins of an electricity-generating waterwheel was visible for years along the oldest part of the Third Creek bike trail; the city tore it down several years ago because it was deemed a security hazard.

But some were built to pump fresh water up to a residence. The well-known waterwheel at the entrance to Westmoreland, at the corner of Sherwood Drive and Westland, was built in 1923 to pump water before there was dependable water service out here. Though property owner Daniel Clary Webb--attorney and father of the guy who founded Webb School--built that one to catch the eye, even enlisting one of his era's best-known architects, Charlie Barber, to design it, it did serve that practical purpose, if for only about five years.

The one in the ravine off Lyons Bend, which is about a mile and a half southeast of Judge Webb's waterwheel--back then, it would have been a half-hour walk through the country--is much larger, but was built about the same time, and served the same purpose.

Few get to see it up close. In our experience, Lyons Bend is a curvy, narrow road for people in a very big hurry. Slowing down to look at an unusual waterwheel is, by the standards of Lyons Bend drivers, mere foolishness and not permissible. However, inspired by your query, we found a way to hike in.

We went there recently with one of our chief hydraulics consultants, Mr. Loch Neely, who used to take care of the Westmoreland waterwheel, and had a look. It's built almost like a suburban house, finished with a stucco exterior and a good slate roof, and has two small rooms not counting the wheelhouse itself. It has a four-cylinder engine with a patent date of 1923, so we suspect the waterwheel was built soon after that. Though there's some damage to the back of it, the house and the apparatus are in remarkably good shape. The wheel can't turn now because some of the spokes are twisted, but the grease on its axle suggests it has operated within your memory and mine, and it looks as if a day or two of hard work could get it running again.

A good-sized mill pond, a few hundred yards to the north, is not as visible from the road; we approached it via a scant path until we encountered a Keep Out sign, and obediently turned back.

We made some inquiries, and learned the waterwheel was associated with the Van Deventer property.

Born in Iowa, Hugh Van Deventer moved with his family to Knoxville as a teenager in the 1880s. It was an ambitious family. His older brother, Horace Van Deventer, became prominent in progressive civic issues, and ended up as an aide to the State Department, and associate of Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

Hugh studied metallurgy and mining at Harvard, and became a successful industrialist, a founder of the Southern States Portland Cement Co. Though its major operations were in Georgia, he remained here. He married a Baltimore lady, Garafilia Lyon, in 1898, and they had two sons. They lived downtown, as nearly everyone did, but in his early 50s, Hugh Van Deventer became kind of a suburban pioneer.

Before World War I, most Knoxvillians, rich and poor, lived within walking distance of downtown. But in the 1920s, the affluent, who owned the first generation of automobiles dependable enough to allow multi-mile commuting, discovered other living options. Van Deventer was a member, and eventually president, of the vigorous Knoxville Automobile Club, a group that pushed better roads and interesting destinations in the days before most Americans had cars. Many of the early auto-club members chose to live outside of town in the 1920s, well off the streetcar grid.

It was pretty daring to build this far out, where one had few neighbors, and one of the closest was what was known then as the Lyons View Asylum for the Insane. Was Garafilia Lyon kin to the Knoxville Lyons who settled along the river generations before them? Did the Van Deventers find Lyons Bend appealing for that reason? It's not obvious in the records, but Van Deventer built a particulary fine, modern house well outside city limits on Lyons Bend. His wife Garafilia enlisted famous Danish-born landscape architect Jens Jensen to plan a formal garden; Jensen is one of America's best-known landscape architects, and he reportedly considered this result one of the "greatest feats" of his career. Last we heard, the garden was fallow, but its design was still conspicuous.

Van Deventer had been particularly interested in hydroelectric power, and had been involved in a project of that nature on the Hiwassee. We wonder if the waterwheel was a particularly picturesque experiment.

And what strikes you when you look at it closely is the amount of poured concrete in both the waterwheel house and the dam. Would someone who didn't run a large concrete company have used it quite so proudly?

What Van Deventer established here was almost a self-sustaining suburban paradise by the river, between the woods and the city. But by the time it was completed, Hugh Van Deventer may already have been seriously ill. He went to a specialist in Richmond, Virginia, for surgery and treatment of a condition not named in the newspapers, and unexpectedly died in March, 1925. Records differ about his age at the time, but he seems to have been only 53 or 54.

Later, Hugh Van Deventer's son married Bill Haslam's grandmother. So the builder of the waterwheel was sort of our new governor's step-great-grandfather. As a result of that complicated connection, the Big Jim Haslam family now lives in the old Van Deventer house, but the waterwheel is now on another homeowner's property.

A bit of a coincidence is that in the new "Knoxville Remembered" 2011 calendar sold by Knoxville Public Library, the image for January is an artful holiday shot of seven skaters, in silhouette, skating on the frozen-over Van Deventer pond, on January 2, 1926.

By the way, in reference to the phrasing of your original question, is Lyons Bend now considered Rocky Hill? We do have such a hard time keeping up. The site of this waterwheel is more than a mile, as the crow flies, from what we're used to thinking of as Rocky Hill. Lyons Bend is a geographical feature of its own, a river peninsula. But it does lack a commercial center, and perhaps we have come to name our communities after where we shop for groceries and drink beer. Ergo, perhaps now Lyons Bend is indeed becoming Greater Rocky Hill. What's considered "Bearden" is a good deal bigger than it used to be, too, as if it's been slowly expanding its borders. Areas without places you can get out of your car and walk around may well run the hazard of being annexed, in the public mind, by the places that do.

Yr. Obt. Svt.