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The Lonsdale Riddle: What's With All Those Streets Named After Northern States?

2013-02-20T17:20:13Z

Dear Z. Heraclitus Knox, 5th Earl of the Firth of Forth:

I have a question about the street names in the Lonsdale community. Why are they named after different states? Somebody told me that it was because of the Civil War, but the streets have names of Northern states. My family used to live on Delaware and that's definitely up North. I think Lonsdale wasn't around at the time of the Civil War as a community because the houses are old, but not that old. I was wondering if you know anything about it. Also, the big question is, why do we have some streets that change names once you go past an intersection? I hate this. I learned to drive out of state and for the most part if you drove down a road it stayed the same name for miles and miles. Yep, and what is a pike, besides a fish, too?

Thanks,

Bryant West

Dear. Mr. West:

We do have a one-question maximum, but since your questions are related, and have fairly simple answers, even though some are "I don't know."

Street names are a murky subject. The developers or city officials who choose street names aren't obliged to explain the process of nomenclature in the public record at the time, and rarely volunteer to do so. Downtown's Mulvaney Street was a mystery for decades, perhaps so perplexing that the city finally just got rid of it, and renamed the place Hall of Fame Drive. Given the turmoil of the last year or so, that name may also puzzle Knoxvillians of the future.

We're always free to guess.

The Civil War was obviously on the minds of the developers of Lonsdale, because several of the cross streets are named for Civil War generals.

Developers are not known for their imagination, and the only rule is that it be a name not already be in use elsewhere in town. So States and Civil War Generals, like a couple of Jeopardy! categories, might have just seemed the quickest solution.

You're correct about the ages of Lonsdale's houses, which are old, but not Civil-War old. Lonsdale developed in 1890, the year of Knoxville's huge Blue-Gray Reunion, most of which took place at the ruins of Fort Sanders. That may have been a specific inspiration for this development.

Some other cities have major streets named after seemingly random states. Washington, D.C., and Oak Ridge, Tenn., both come to mind. Knoxville's state streets just happen to be less conspicuous, tucked away in a neighborhood. By the way, even before Lonsdale, there were a few state streets on the northeast corner of downtown, just east of the Old City: three--Florida, Georgia, and Kentucky Streets--still survive. The fact that some Southern street names had already been used may account for the abundance of Northern states on Lonsdale's grid.

To be fair, there are some Southern states represented in Lonsdale, too: Alabama, Texas, and Tennessee. But a predominance of Northern state names wouldn't necessarily imply there was no Civil War connection. As you may know, Knoxville was divided in its loyalties during the war, and both before and after the war the city was always home to a pretty healthy contingent of northerners. It's safe to say that in rapidly growing Knoxville of the 1890s, the city was home to residents from every state honored in Lonsdale.

Most of the streets in Lonsdale were indeed named for states that sent troops into battle, but Dakota Street throws that theory off a bit; during that war, Dakota was a vague and sparsely settled territory populated mostly by Sioux who were not much interested in the white man's carnage.

If Lonsdale leans north in state names, it also does in generals. Bragg was a Confederate, and Stonewall may be an homage to Stonewall Jackson, but the rebs are outnumbered by their neighbors. Sherman, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Schofield, all Lonsdale streets, were Union generals.

About street names changing block to block, that's simply the residue of piecemeal development. Often two streets develop independently and happen to eventually meet. Nobody on either street wants the expense and bother of changing their address to suit the other street, so they just keep their names.

Sometimes street names do change in favor of a unified name. East Jackson Avenue, for example, used to be Hardee Street. So there appears to be a trend in favor of nomenclatorial unification, albeit a glacially slow one. Just give it a couple more centuries, and you may find Knoxville more to your liking.

If Knoxville's frustrating in that regard, you should try London. There, lots of streets are only one block long.

Pike is short for "turnpike," which was a device that assisted collectors of tolls on longer roads when they were new. Here, pikes tend to be longer streets that began as big private projects. In the 18th and 19th centuries, tax revenues were limited, so travelers just paid for roads as they used them. It seems the fairest of systems, each traveler paying his own way without troubling the taxpayer. Shouldn't modern-day conservatives favor more toll roads?

Yr. Obt. Svt.,

Brig. Gen. Z. Heraclitus Knox, U.S.A., C.S.A., G.D.I.

Send your question of historical consequence to: editor@metropulse.com.

The Infamous McClung Warehouses

2012-12-21T21:05:04Z

Dear Doc Knox:

Do you have any history into the significance of the McClung Warehouses as well as the McClung family in the Knoxville area?

I would love to see some development rehabilitate the structures and continue to connect the growth and revival of the West Jackson Avenue corridor.

Do you think it is important to maintain the existing structures not only for their structural integrity but historical significance within the area?

Inquisitively,

Tyler B.

My Dear Mr. B:

Why, yes, in a word.

Founded in 1884, C.M. McClung & Co. built these warehouses to be adjacent to the region's busiest freight yards; almost a mile of Jackson Avenue was lined with railroad-oriented wholesale businesses. These were major drivers of Knoxville's economy during its late-19th-century boom years. Only a few of these buildings remain.

McClung, which published an annual mail-order catalogue of its many offerings, was Knoxville's answer to Sears, Roebuck, and was, for decades, enormously successful. Oriented generally to a regional customer base, McClung sold lots of agricultural equipment, very broadly defined: everything from its own brand of rifle to perhaps the first barbed wire East Tennessee farmers had ever seen.

Its founder, Calvin McClung (1855-1919) was a member of a family that included some of Knoxville's founders. A graduate of our local university, he earned a graduate degree in chemistry from Yale and founded C.M. McClung & Co. when he bought out a family business when he was only 27. He was involved in several other businesses, from banking to cotton, and was one of the original trustees of Lawson McGhee Library.

We're lucky that he wasn't content just to be a businessman. McClung was also one of the leading local historians of his day and started a collection of books and historic artifacts that became the nucleus of what we know as the McClung Collection. The McClung Collection now takes up the third floor of the East Tennessee History Center, in the old Custom House building. It's where we spend much of our time. Most of C.M. McClung's catalogs are on file there, and make for pretty interesting reading.

The McClung Warehouses, the oldest of which dated to 1893, began to get attention in the 1990s, in the early days of downtown residential development. Collectively they seemed to offer enormous potential to be one of downtown's biggest residential anchors. One building in the center of the complex was occupied and used by a local artisan.

On more than one occasion, the owner and would-be developer of the other four buildings announced a grand residential scheme for high-density, affordable housing on West Jackson.
The owner made some substantial improvements to the buildings, but, protesting about what he perceived as preferential treatment toward other downtown developers in terms of public incentives, never completed his plans. Concerned that the buildings remained a dangerous liability and an eyesore, preservationists and city officials demanded that the owner either finish his project or sell the buildings. Property-rights absolutists declared the owner should be allowed to proceed at his own pace.

His residential proposal never seemed to catch fire; unfortunately, his buildings did. Empty buildings do indeed have a distressing tendency to ignite, and almost six years ago, a spectacular fire destroyed the larger part of the collection of buildings, erasing the older parts of McClung Warehouses from the landscape, and, when a wall collapsed, demolishing a city firetruck.

Methinks the fire complicated the political usefulness of the issue. The owner's exercising of his property rights resulted, indirectly, in costing city taxpayers hundreds of thousands in collateral damage, plus the destruction of a well-kept building owned by another party. Absolute property-rights theories work best in the pristine countryside.

However, thanks to prompt attention from the fire department, two good-sized buildings were saved. The buildings still standing date to about 1911 and 1927. Several downtown developers are interested in purchasing and rehabbing them. And since the fire, residential development has begun to stretch from Gay Street toward the McClung site.

For half a decade now, the fates of the buildings have been batted around between bankruptcy court, the city, Knoxville's Community Development Corporation, and the owner himself, who is demanding millions to relinquish what remains of the warehouses. The last we heard, the issue was at a stalemate, and from what we can tell, no parties are moving very urgently. The worst-case outcome is Dickensian. Sometimes lawsuits outlast the litigants.
By the way, these old warehouses on Jackson are worth a footnote in rock 'n' roll history.

Though former Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman probably hasn't performed in Knoxville since he came to the Civic Coliseum with the lads in 1972, he used a Knoxville photo for the cover of the American release of his much-praised 1999 solo album, Anyway the Wind Blows. That photo, taken by then-sometime Metro Pulse photographer Aaron Jay, shows the McClung Warehouses in the background. The buildings most prominently visible in the photo are the ones that are gone.

Yours sincerely,

Z. Heraclitus Knox, C.O.D., O.C.D.

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Good News for the Walker-Sherrill House?

2012-11-14T20:49:50Z

Dear Doc Knox,

Now that the corners of Cedar Bluff and Kingston Pike are being overrun with more monstrous parking lots and big-box stores, I'm wondering what's to become of the old (antebellum, possibly?) brick house just to the west of The Academy Sporting Goods store. It's been cleared of vines and debris, but please tell me that there are some kind of plans for it and not be torn down, just like so many others of Knoxville's historic properties!

Thanks much!

Janet Merritt

My Dear Ms. Merritt:

This is one of the older queries in our ever-more-cluttered mail bin, and I abjectly apologize for the lengthy delay.

It's an important question, and one that has been the subject of hundreds of hours of work by local preservationists as well as the developers trying to deal with them. When we first received your inquiry, we had intelligence that there were some deals in the works to save the house, but nothing was clear, and we are loath to make hasty assumptions.

The house at 9320 Kingston Pike is indeed antebellum. It is in fact one of the oldest houses in West Knoxville. Formally known as the Walker-Sherrill House (for those with more breath and better memory for names, the Kennedy-Baker-Walker-Sherrill House), it was built around 1849, the year many locals took off down Kingston Pike headed for the gold fields of California, some of them never to return.

When it was built, the house was described as 17 miles west of Knoxville. Though the former state capital, Knoxville was by 1849 a not-quite-forgotten little town of about 2,000 that hadn't yet negotiated a railroad or much industry, but the optimistic found reason to hope.

The house is owned by a rather vague-sounding developer called Kingston Pike LLC, which plans to develop most of the land and will save the house itself, in cooperation with preservationist group Knox Heritage.

They're obliged to save it, in fact. One of the results of the last five years of negotiation is that the house is a rare subject of historic-overlay zoning. However, the house has changed ownership even in its short time as a vacant wreck, with different owner-developers who have different degrees of respect, or lack of same, for the house. Meanwhile, the house has been rapidly deteriorating, in visibly worse shape than it was in when Metro Pulse first ran a story about it some five years ago. While we've been waiting, the house's rare woodwork mantels, worth thousands on the open market, were stolen.

Preservationists hope it can be saved in time to preserve some of its integrity, like its original broad-plank hardwood floors, but don't expect to see it tumble down in the next storm. Its walls are five bricks thick. We do not build houses like this anymore.

The Walker-Sherill House is currently on the agenda of the Metropolitan Planning Commission, in rezoning discussions, and the developer's proposal--which includes local developer Bill Hodges of nearby Franklin Square redeveloping the house for office space--will go before the Historic Zoning Commission this Thursday.

It's been home to several families over the years. Within living memory, the Sherrills ran a handsome 100-acre farm from this house; their unusual barn, large but handcrafted with some interesting woodwork, has already vanished.

The brick house's best-known resident was likely Dr. William Baker (1800-1865). A Transylvania University graduate, Baker was originally from Lancaster, Ky., near Lexington, and trained to be a surgeon. He moved to Knoxville around 1825, and here he and two brothers became well known as physicians. First based on Gay Street, William Baker was noted as a lithotomist, a surgeon dealing in the removal of impertinent intestinal stones.

He may have at least a footnote in medical history; he was the lead surgeon in what is reported to be the third successful hysterectomy in medical history. In that operation he was assisted by his close associate, Dr. John Mason Boyd, the "Beloved Physician" memorialized with a marble corner porte-cochere on the Knox County courthouse lawn.

His brother Dr. Harvey Baker was the first to move out to Kingston Pike, where he built what's now known as the Baker-Peters House. Just before the Civil War, William Baker joined his brother out here to relish the joys of suburban life in his declining years. He called the place Cedar Grove, and was known for keeping some fine horses out here.

In 1864, his brother and closest neighbor Harvey was shot to death by rogue Union troops inside the Baker-Peters House. Harvey's son, Abner, a recent Confederate veteran, was famously lynched in 1865 after killing a man downtown, reputedly because young Baker suspected the man of involvement in his father's killing. William Baker, an elder in First Presbyterian Church, had no children of his own; by 1865, Abner Baker was one of his closest relatives. His influence is believed to be the reason the church offered young Abner an unusual variance, allowing him to be buried under an unusual obelisk in the long-closed churchyard. Dr. William Baker himself died just two weeks later, at age 64.

Yours,

Z. Heraclitus Knox

Send your question of a historical nature to editor@metropulse.com. Expect a delivery time of four to six weeks.

Knoxville's Mysteriously Missing Streets

2012-10-18T21:12:05Z

Dear Doc Knox:

We have 11th through 22nd Streets in Fort Sanders, and I remember 10th Street before the World's Fair. But were there ever First through Ninth Streets?

Joseph T. Corbell

My Dear Mr. Corbell:

Well, the short answer is Yes. With an asterisk, followed by an extensive further annotation.

History, sir, is not for the timid. The current street names seem old, and are. 11th Street has been known as 11th Street for close to 90 years. There may be no one alive who recalls when it was called anything different. But they're not the first names these old streets have gone by. They're not even the second.

Here we should interject a discursive story that may or may not be relevant. The numbered streets of Fort Sanders are seemingly unrelated to the numbered avenues on the north side of downtown, whose origins are a little mysterious and not necessarily sensible. Their origins are at least as puzzling. Of the numbered "avenues," Third through Ninth survive, some of them in bits and pieces. (We hypothesized about it a few years ago in a column that can be accessed at metropulse.com.)

Knoxville's First and Second Avenues are the most mysterious. They were never much to begin with, materializing only briefly on the north side of town, in what was then just beyond corporate city limits, in the 1850s. They both vanished during the Civil War, perhaps lasting less than five years.

But back to your question, and Fort Sanders' famous ordinal numeration.
When this war-scarred battlefield was first developed in the years after the Civil War, its north-south streets were bestowed with proper-name names: beginning on the east side, Morrow, Scott, Blount, John, Ann, Dickinson, Temple, and Ft. Sanders Avenue. That last street, roughly the one we now know as 17th, earned that name by the fact that it led up to the ruins of the old federal earthworks, which were still visible until the very early 1900s.

For most of the 19th century, this area was considered rural countryside. The City of Knoxville's western boundary was at Second Creek--bisecting what's now World's Fair Park. After mostly affluent people began to build houses here, they began to realize it would behoove them to organize a municipal government of some sort. So in the late 1880s, they incorporated as "West Knoxville."

For reasons of their own, the suburbanites dumped the old proper names in favor of numbered streets. The Knoxville newspapers made a little fun of them, suggesting they were trying to give their bedroom community a bit of Manhattan flair, and maybe they were. Many Laurel Avenue types summered in New York.

Presumably the numbers started with a First Street, in the vicinity of Second Creek, then an industrial bottomland with railroad tracks multiplying on it. But it's not clear there was ever anything with its formal address on First Street, hence references to it are scant. Second Street, though, was what you remember as 10th, now roughly World's Fair Drive. Third Street was what's now 11th. And so on.

In 1897, the city of Knoxville had enough of this "West Knoxville" foolishness and annexed the whole thing, after which it tended to be better known as "West End" (the neighborhood wasn't very consistently known as "Fort Sanders" until the 1950s). But the streets remained in place, First Street through roughly 14th Street, without regard to the greater municipal entity's north-south axis and naming patterns. In James Agee's youth, for example, that's how they were. Until recently, at least, a few Fort Sanders street corners still bore brass signage, embedded in the sidewalk, indicating numbered streets exactly eight blocks off, like "Fifth Street" on modern-day 13th Street. We haven't noticed them lately; they may have been casualties of handicap-accessibility improvements.

But then, about 1924, the city renumbered West End's streets to conform to their city addresses--by shifting them all by a factor of eight. What does eight represent? Literally, I suppose, that eight represents the eight blocks from Second Creek, at the old eastern edge of West Knoxville, to Knoxville's defining north-south axis, Central Street. Hence 11th Street today is 11 blocks from Central.

Changing street names is a traumatic and usually unpopular thing, because everyone must change their addresses. Fortunately there were relatively few addresses on the numbered streets, most houses facing the longer avenues.

But it occurs to us that one motive for the numbering change might have been the existence of Third through Ninth Avenues, back on the north side of town. The numbers excised from Fort Sanders were the same numbers that already existed as avenues on the north and northeast side of town. Perhaps it prevents confusion that Knoxville has only one "Ninth," and only one "11th"--on opposite sides of downtown.

Yours sincerely,

Z. Heraclitus Knox, 5th Earl of the Firth of Forth

Have you a curious point of historical reference that needs clarification? Ask Doc Knox at: editor@metropulse.com.

Knoxville: the South's Best Baseball Town?

2012-09-12T14:49:20Z

Hello,
I was wondering if Doc Knox could shed some light on the history of professional/semi-pro baseball teams in Knoxville. I was reading J. Neely's article on John Gunther and there was a mention of a team called the Smokies in the '60s. Any info about other teams, other stadiums and just the history of baseball on Knoxville would be great!
Love your paper.

Bo Shipley

My Dear Mr. Shipley:

The world may have forgotten--football-happy Tennessee certainly has--but Knoxville played a role in the history of Southern baseball. For at least 60 years, baseball was Knoxville's favorite spectator sport.

It's a little ironic, considering how things have shaken out. East Tennessee was rather slow, compared to the rest of America, to warm up to football. But in 1865, when baseball was just a Yankee rumor in most of the South, Knoxville was home to at least two organized teams. Long ago, some claimed in print that the first baseball game in the South was played on Gay Street in 1865. We know there was some baseball in New Orleans before the Civil War, but what happened along the 400 block of Gay, in the summer of '65, may have been the first baseball game in Tennessee.

Much of what we know of it came down by way of a published interview with the guy who led the effort. Sam Dow, a former Union soldier, arranged to clean up a dump site as an appropriate ball park in a then-undeveloped part of downtown, bottomland beside a steep slope that would be useful as an amphitheater. Home plate was where the Downtown Grill & Brewery is today, and the outfield angled to the north.

Dow attempted to get up a bipartisan team to represent the whole city, but when the fellows convened in a Gay Street saloon, they noticed immediately that the Confederates didn't show up. They'd formed their own team, called the Holstons. The Union guys called themselves the Knoxvilles, and thus the first organized team sport ever played in Knoxville, just months after Appomattox, was between the blues and the grays. As in that other rivalry, the blues won.
Within a couple of years, the amateurs were playing for prize money, and by the 1870s, a group called the Knoxville Reds was more or less a semi-pro team, its matches heartily attended and heavily wagered. Records about league affiliation from that period are scarce, but biased fans later claimed that team was the South's finest, and even a national contender at the minor-league level.

Squeezed out of the original diamond by private development--the east side of the 400 block of Gay was known as the Old Base Ball Grounds for some decades--baseball moved around town, played sometimes at Chilhowee Park, sometimes at a new park cleared at Dale Avenue near Asylum Street, called Baldwin Park.

Around World War I, William Caswell, an elderly veteran of that first baseball game in 1865--he played for the Holstons--established a permanent park on the banks of First Creek, just northeast of downtown. Caswell Park was the home of Knoxville baseball for about 80 years.

Known as the Reds up until the Caswell Park era, Knoxville's team went through spells as the Appalachians and the Pioneers, but for most of the 20th century, our professional minor-league team, which bounced between AA, AAA, and AAAA affiliations, was the Knoxville Smokies. They seem to have gotten that name at about the time of the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Caswell Park was the site of a baseball Event, in April, 1934, when the New York Yankees played an exhibition series there, while staying at the Farragut Hotel downtown. The more than 5,000 Knoxvillians who witnessed the esteemed visitors were not displeased when both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig hit homers against the Smokies.

At Caswell Park, in the early 1950s, the Smokies' new stadium was named for the much-admired manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Billy Meyer--a Knoxville native and a veteran of the ca. 1910 Knoxville Reds.

That stadium witnessed some splendid seasons, but also a general decline of interest in pro baseball, as Knoxville became more and more preoccupied with UT sports and other pursuits. Writing for Harper's in 1967, Pulitzer-winner J. Anthony Lukas wrote a melancholy story about Knoxville baseball, which seemed to be dying. He blamed the malaise, in large part, on the weekend distraction of TVA's new lakes. The old Knoxville sports fan, it concluded, was spending his time and money on boating.

Knoxville lost its team that year. It bounded back in the early '70s, rebuilding its small but loyal audiences, as the Knox Sox, then the Knoxville Blue Jays, aka K-Jays. Among the talents Knoxville got to witness up close before they were big-league stars were pitchers Todd Stottlemyre and Juan Guzman and catcher Pat Borders. In the late 1970s, Knoxville got to witness the work of a young manager named Tony LaRussa.

They had their ups and downs, but seemed to be experiencing an upswing in popularity in the '90s, just before the organization moved 20 miles east to become the Tennessee Smokies.
But it ain't over, as the sage says, till it's over.

Your obt. svt.

Z. Heraclitus "Shoeless Z" Knox

Have a historic stickler of a query? Send it to the good doctor in care of this periodical's editor: editor@metropulse.com.

The Long-ago Fisticuffs of John Williams Jr.

2012-05-24T14:48:20Z

Dear Dr. Knox:

I cannot find a decent biography of John Williams, Jr. (1818-1881), the son of Colonel John Williams. Can you help?

I am researching Horace Maynard, who was attacked with a cane by Williams in a Knoxville street on August 14,1867.

Why this occurred, The New York Times of August 15 does not state.

D. Wake

My Dear Mr. Wake:

We can bet this fracas between a couple of prominent middle-aged Knoxville gentlemen wasn't about a dame. August, 1867, was a dangerous month for Tennesseans of any political persuasion.

Horace Maynard (1814-1882) is one of the most interesting people who ever lived in Knoxville. Originally from Massachusetts, and rumored to be part Indian, the long-haired lawyer had a reputation as kind of a literary radical as a young man, perhaps what we'd call a bohemian. But he was an ambitious one: A math professor and sometime newspaper columnist, Maynard became an attorney and, in 1857, a U.S. Congressman. When the war came along Maynard was a strong Unionist, and was an extremely rare representative of a Confederate state who kept his seat in the U.S. House during the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln liked Maynard, sometimes conferred with him, and reportedly considered him for a cabinet position.

When Maynard shifted his allegiance from the dying Whig Party, he gave Tennessee's 2nd District its first in an unbroken line of Republicans that has lasted almost 150 years.

Republicans in general were not popular in the South after the Civil War, of course. Maynard made it tougher for himself by sometimes aligning himself with the punitive Radical Republicans. He remained popular in his East Tennessee district, repeatedly re-elected to office. But 1867 was a time of fierce Southern resentment of Maynard and his fellow Republicans.

Col. John Williams (Jr.) (1818-1881) is less well known, and probably doesn't have a biography. A grandson of Knoxville founder James White, Williams is often confused with his father, who was also known as "Col. John Williams." To the consternation of generations of casual historians to come, neither of them seemed to regularly use a Sr. or Jr. or a I or a II.

We referred to Junior a couple of years ago in a column about his handsome old house, which is still standing on Riverside Drive. He was not nationally famous, as Maynard was, but he had been a member of the Tennessee Legislature in the 1840s and '50s, and like Maynard, had been a notable Whig before the war. They were both Unionists. However, Williams and Maynard parted ways, politically, after the war's end.

Williams was a close friend of the embattled president, Andrew Johnson, who had alienated the more progressive wing of the Republican Party and was facing impeachment. Congressman Maynard, who sometimes allied himself with the radical Republicans who hated Johnson, was generally an opponent of the president. That couldn't have helped the Williams-Maynard friendship.

However, if we had to bet, it was about the gubernatorial election, earlier that month, and the many insults swapped in the press in those bitter days. "Parson" William G. Brownlow, the South's closest approximation of a Radical Republican, favored the vote for freedmen and opposed enfranchising former Confederates, and had just been elected governor of Tennessee. His most powerful political ally in 1867 Tennessee was Knoxville's Horace Maynard, who often campaigned for him.

Brownlow's opponent in 1867 was conservative Unionist Henry Emerson Etheridge (1819-1902), a West Tennessee former slaveholder who had condemned emancipation, but later tried unsuccessfully to befriend the emancipated. His closest ally, in East Tennessee, at least, was John Williams. Etheridge and Williams often stumped together, and Williams was often mentioned as if he were a running mate.

Articles sometimes referred to the gubernatorial race as "Etheridge and Williams" versus "Brownlow and Maynard." The source of the quarrel could have been some of the invective in the press. Brownlow's landslide victory in early August provoked both gloating and bitter resentment.

Brownlow's paper, the Knoxville Whig, was no friend of Etheridge and Williams. Etheridge had reportedly refused to debate Maynard, because the latter was "not a gentleman." But in an editorial published the morning of the assault, the Whig remarked on Etheridge's "wicked and profane habits and low and vulgar associations."

Fortunately, the 53-year-old Maynard survived the beating. He later became ambassador to Turkey, where he was able to assist Heinrich Schliemann in the excavation of ancient Troy. Still later, Maynard was U.S. Postmaster. He became the namesake of the new town of Maynardville, home of several famous country musicians, and made even more famous as the home of the vengeful scalper in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

John Williams maintained his friendship with Johnson, whom he sometimes entertained at his home on Riverside Drive. When John Williams II is remembered today, it's probably most often as the great-grandfather of the playwright known as Tennessee Williams.

Yr. Obt. Svt.

Z. Heraclitus Knox

Have a curious point of historical contention? Send your question to the good doctor at editor@metropulse.com.

The Short Career of Early Country Music Singer George Reneau

2012-03-29T20:29:21Z

Dear Doc Knox,

I am searching for information on a local musician and relative, "Blind" George Reneau. I know that he performed around Knoxville, and recorded some 78 rpm records. (My dad has one of the records). I can't find much info about him, so anything you have would be appreciated.

Ed Reneau

Knoxville

My Dear Mr. Reneau:

We are honored to consider your question, and welcome this chance to discuss one of country music's not-quite-forgotten forebears.

Before Nashville had its first recording studio, before Roy Acuff learned to play fiddle, before the landmark Bristol recordings, there was George Reneau, of Knoxville, Tenn. He was making records, and selling them, as one of America's first professional country musicians.

It wasn't a very dependable way to make a living, which is why many of the people who were attracted to making a profession of folk, blues, or country music were people whose career choices were limited anyway, because they were disabled. As was the case with Piedmont blues during the same era, several of country music's first recording artists were blind musicians who were accustomed to performing on the sidewalk beside a tin cup.

Our knowledge of Reneau's life is a little foggy, as is the case with many pioneers of folk, blues, and country music, but he seems to have been born in 1901 in Jefferson County. He first arrived in Knoxville as a very young man, maybe still a teenager, soon after World War I. By some accounts he worked the streets, playing music for the nickels of kind strangers. He lived downtown, in cheap boarding houses, sometimes off alleys. Probably around 1923, an influential passerby named Gus Nennsteil heard Reneau play. Nennsteil worked for Sterchi Brothers Furniture. Headquartered on Gay Street, and with 60 stores around the South, Sterchi's claimed to be the biggest furniture company in the world.

You might not expect a furniture dealer would have strong connections to the recording industry, but it was a different time. In 1923, Sterchi was looking to expand the market for one of its newer products, the phonograph machine. Rich people had been buying phonographs for more than 20 years, and they tended to go for opera, classical, sometimes religious or patriotic music. Radio was brand new, and crooners of popular vaudeville songs had been catching on, too. But as for working-class music, folk music, country music, no one had ever recorded it much. Sterchi's might have been the South's biggest purveyor of phonographs, and its executives were convinced they saw a major untapped market for them, especially as less-expensive models were coming out. To reach a working-class market, Sterchi believed, it might be useful to provide them some good working-class music. And in hearing Reneau's guitar and harmonica playing, and his plaintive lyrics, Nennsteil thought he'd found the very thing.

Sterchi's had already enlisted a few other musicians to send to the closest professional music-recording studios, which were in New York. Reneau took that trip in the spring of 1924. They weren't sure about his rough voice, at first, and got a pop crooner to sing Reneau's songs over Reneau's guitar accompaniment. Gene Austin, who's much more associated with early jazz--"Bye Bye Blackbird" and "My Blue Heaven"--sang the vocals on some of Reneau's first recordings. But soon they decided a rough voice was sometimes perfect, especially for this new musical genre. Reneau eventually cut about 70 songs in the New York studios. Among them are some minor classics: "Here, Rattler, Here," "Rovin' Gambler," "Wild Bill Jones," "Wild and Reckless Hobo."

We see a recurrent theme in his choice of material. He seemed to be drawn to the subject of wildness, and roving. But at that time, he lived in a boarding house called Maggie Guinn's on Wall Avenue near Market Square.

Reneau was sometimes associated with another blind guitarist and harmonica player, Charlie Oaks, who was probably a generation older than Reneau, and had been at it since about 1900, but the two both made their first recordings in New York at the same time.

Note that this is a few years before the landmark field recordings in Bristol in 1927. Those recordings of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family were important, certainly, probably the most influential country-music recordings of their era, and long before Nashville was involved in country-music recording.

But country music thrived earlier, even as a recording-industry phenomenon. Reneau took the train to New York to make his recordings. If the first recordings of country are what matters most, New York City is the Birthplace of Country Music.

By 1926, Reneau was one of the very few who had the temerity to list himself as a professional "musician" in Knoxville city directories. But despite all the trips to New York, he never got rich. Married to a woman named Elsie, he lived in an alley between Central and State Streets called St. Charles, near the First Presbyterian graveyard.

Interest in Reneau's music peaked around that time; he'd caught the first wave of country-music mania, but then it was over. By the time of the Bristol sessions, Reneau was already a country-music has-been. When his old label, Vocalion, came to Knoxville in 1929 to record what have become known as the St. James sessions, Reneau wasn't part of the party.

By the time the Great Depression had hit, he had returned to the Knoxville streets. According to the story, George Reneau been playing guitar outside in the cold in December, 1933, when he came down with pneumonia and died. He was then 31 years old.

Reneau is remembered by academics as one of the very first professional country musicians. The late country-music historian Charles K. Wolfe said as much in his recommended book about the history of country music in this state, Tennessee Strings.

For a long time, it was hard to find George Reneau's music. A 1998 CD compilation called My Rough and Rowdy Ways included his ballad about Jesse James. But thanks to YouTube, several George Reneau songs, recorded in the mid-1920s, are available to listen to. "The Lonesome Road" was a tune later better known as "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad," with its chorus, "I ain't gonna be treated this-a-way." An early country classic, it was later recorded by Woody Guthrie, Bill Monroe, and many others, but Reneau's record was one of the first. His recording, "The Baggage Coach Ahead," also on YouTube, is one of the saddest songs ever recorded.

Naturally, we'd be interested to hear more about what you know about your relative, this seminal and too-often overlooked figure in the history of country music.

Yr. Obt. Svt.

Z. Heraclitus Knox

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Knoxville's Slag Heaps and Forgotten Fens

2012-02-01T19:15:53Z

Dear Doc Knox:

Not including the river, where was Knoxville's first city dump/landfill?

Airmack

My Dear Mr. Airmack:

We assume by not including the river, we're also excusing First and Second creeks, which were used as dumps probably from the first time James White's kids took out the trash in 1786.

We can't be certain what any cluster of citizens might have considered a dump. But the first dump we know of on actual land was, believe it or not, right on Gay Street, what's now the 300-400 block.

Two centuries ago, the block of Gay northeast of the intersection of Gay and Union offered a dropoff way down toward First Creek's floodplain. The bank was so steep it was considered impossible to develop commercially by the architecture and resources of the day, and whether by city permission or not, citizens began using it as a dump. Before the Civil War, the area was north of the main business section, and probably didn't bother anybody much.

It was a pretty big area, though, and, then as now, flat land was a rarity in the downtown area, so occasionally the townsfolk would clear a space for another use, for a circus, for example, or, in 1865, for what may have been the first baseball game ever played in Tennessee. The steep hill up to Gay offered a natural amphitheater.

The dump/ballfield era finally ended in the 1880s, when boom-town Knoxville began building very large buildings, tall enough to address the Gay Street sidewalk but planted in the old dump. Most of them burned down in the Great Fire of 1897, but were quickly rebuilt, and that's what you see when you visit, say, Sapphire, the Downtown Grill, the Art Market, or Mast.

Dear Doc Knox:

Have you ever heard of the fen known as Shityronto? I was told it was a most vile and ugly place with all manner of critters: a repository of animals and on occasion associates who failed to pay debts owed. When one was missing from the Old City district, the first place to search was Shityronto. This was told to me by my great-uncle, Mr. Harve E. Rogers. He was a self-made man, whose family moved to Knoxville in 1902. This marsh was on the east side of Central, just past the railroad tracks, now the site of the Greyhound bus station. This fen was filled in when work started on Magnolia Avenue. I can find no mention of it at the McClung Collection anywhere. This site made quite an impact on a young 15-year-old new to Knoxville in 1902, who, after arriving here at 9 at night in a mule-pulled wagon and only gas lights every 100 feet or so, had to pass the vile fen known then as--Shityronto.

Robert

My Dear Robert:

With your permission, we have nominated that as the question of the year. My research eunuchs have attempted to look up Shityronto on the Web. Apparently the word, if it is indeed a word, has never before been typed onto a website anywhere in the world. It is a Knoxville original. I hesitate even to speculate about a derivation.

I have reason to believe there is some truth in your family story. However, it might require some adjustments to the time period, and/or the precise spot.

It wouldn't likely have been precisely where the Greyhound station is in 1902, because that block was built out with urban development even in the late 1800s. (See our answer, from a couple of years ago, to a question about a medicine bottle.) Also the area just north of the railroad tracks was dominated after 1885 by the large White Lily factory, where men worked late shifts manufacturing the world's purest flour, rendering it unlikely anything right next door would be consistently sinister.

However, a lot of the area just north of what is now known as the Old City was indeed a big swamp in the mid-19th century. It was known in the early 19th century as the Flag Pond, perhaps a more becoming name than Shityronto. Though it was sometimes used for recreation, such as sailing toy boats, it was at times also dreaded as a health hazard and Knoxville's primary supplier of stench.

It diminished by degrees as one project after another filled it in, beginning around 1840; when the railroad came through in 1855, tons of earth was dumped into it. You don't see as much reference to it thereafter. I would have thought the old Flag Pond wetlands had all been filled in before 1902. But perhaps some pool of it survived, or emerged during wet seasons.

We might also note that First Creek was still exposed in those days, and was only a block or two southeast of the spot you're describing, where it hooked to the east roughly along what's now Willow Street, and then took a northeasterly course. It likely had some wetlands, fens as you say, associated with it.

Your use of the word fen, a word heard more often in Ireland than here, is interesting and appropriate: this area was a fringe of what was known, 100 to 140 years ago, as Irish Town.

Yours Truly,

Z. Heraclitus Knox

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Downtown's Homegrown Revival

2011-11-16T22:07:26Z

Dear Doc Knox:

My wife and I had lived in Knoxville for about 15 years before we left in the early 90's. We returned in '04 and were truly awed by the metamorphosis we saw. A downtown we first experienced as one of the most lifeless had turned into a great little city. It begs the question, have "native" attitudes changed? Or did it take an influx of non-natives to create what's becoming a great little gem?

While it's no doubt a combination of efforts, what was the true "catalyst", if there was such a thing? Who better to have a welcomed perspective than you, I said to myself, as we recently enjoyed crowded restaurants and crowded streets at 10:30 at night! What happened in the very recent "history" of Knoxville to change it so dramatically?

Best regards,

Mike C.

My Dear Mike:

It's a good question, of course. In part it was just a matter of reaching a critical mass, finally half-blundering into the right combination of factors. A lot of the Knoxville-area consumers who make it all work have been here all along but just didn't have a place to go to find gelato, or cigars, or crepes, or tapas. But the question of newcomers is interesting.

There have been important newcomers, of course, like Jeffrey Nash, who's from London. He's the developer of several upscale residential projects, as well as his pet, the Crown & Goose. Newcomers can often see potential that escapes locals, especially a certain generation of locals who remembered when downtown was a limited concept, and they couldn't, or preferred not to, think of it as anything else.

For many people now elderly, downtown was once, at best, all about offices and mainstream retail. When that model sagged, many of them found ways to adapt, often by vacating, and thereafter felt invested in the idea that downtown was just over. Newcomers were probably in the majority of the first generation of downtown residents. Some newcomers were accustomed to downtown living, and preferred it. Now, as you may know, moving back into the city is part of a national trend.

But the idea that downtown's revival suggests an influx of newcomers is a puzzle: It's not clear Knoxville has any more newcomers now than in the past. In fact, we might expect there to be fewer, because our biggest national recruiters, like TVA, ORNL, and UT aren't hiring like they once did.

A lot of what's happened has been the work of locals. Dynamic developer David Dewhirst is from small-town East Tennessee. His mentor was a native: The late Kristopher Kendrick tried to get downtown going about 25 years before it actually did, but he made some progress here and there. In fact, many--perhaps most--key downtown developers and politicians are local enough to remember downtown when it was in the dumps: Bill Haslam, Victor Ashe, Kyle Testerman, Duane Grieve, Leigh Burch, John Craig, Scott and Bernadette West. They may not have much in common, but they're all locals.

The recent historic-theater rehabs--especially ambitious in the case of the Tennessee--were spearheaded by local philanthropic visionaries like the late Wallace Baumann and Robert Webb. What they left us were sonic jewels that impress even big-city music critics. Speaking of, Ashley Capps, lifelong Knoxvillian, has become one of the South's primary music gurus, the mind behind Bonnaroo, Sundown in the City, and the booking of the Tennessee and Bijou. His impact has been enormous.

Still, newcomers are a major factor, mainly as consumers--bringing open-mindedness, and freedom from old patterns and assumptions. And dollars, which even old Knoxville geezers respect.

Yr. Obt. Svt.,

Z. Heraclitus Knox, Native

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Exploring the Wonder House

2011-08-31T21:05:40Z

Dear Doc Knox:

There is an old huge skeleton of a wooden building in the Rocky Hill community on Northshore Drive that is situated on a hill up in the woods. It is on Currier Lane, across from Roosters. It has been there for years and nobody that I know seems to know what it is or was. Any idea?

peggy@comcast.net

My Dear Mme. Comcast:

The street you mention is among the most peculiar in West Knoxville. Hardly more than a lane wide, Currier Lane is marked as a public city road, but looks more like a rural driveway. It climbs steeply away from Northshore, up the hill at a grade we might not recommend for standard automobiles.

Well before the crest of the hill, Currier Lane becomes a "private toll road," run by a pay machine with a camera attached. You can go farther, but you have to pay $1-5, depending on the vehicle. If you don't pay, we presume, it will take your picture, and of course nobody wants that. We hear it's a lovely view up there, which may be the reason for the added security. However, because the price sign and warning did not list a category for Phaeton, we did not participate.

Dr. Knox has never witnessed a Private Toll Road in his hometown, much less an automatically policed one, and is considering the prospect for his own driveway. But you don't have to pay to view the edifice in question. It's on the hill just before you get to the ominous camera.

The mysterious structure is on the right, not far from Northshore: From the road it looks like a strangely large building, larger than most barns but shaped sort of like one, without the customary actual walls. When we first espied it from the road, we wondered if it might be a UT grad student's giant art piece: perhaps something called "Barndream 387."

But look closer--and to do so may require some benign trespassing--and the structure grows less skeletal in appearance and much grander. It appears to be a giant almost-finished building, not for livestock but for people. Above a brick-wall core, with double doors, are what appear to be multiple roofs, and high in the back are some glass windows looking to the south, toward the river and the sun. It looks almost like an eccentric country convention center or retreat.

Its multiple roofs give it an almost pagoda quality, as if it's something Frank Lloyd Wright designed on his sojourn in Japan, perhaps after an evening of especially stimulating sake.

On the Knoxville Geographic Information System (KGIS) website, it's referred to, without further explanation, as "The Wonder House." It's well named, in that it obviously does inspire us to wonder. The property has apparently not been sold since 1955, and has been owned by a family named Wilson. We attempted to contact a member of the family, without success. It seems to have puzzled some of the neighbors we contacted.

But you've piqued our curiosity. We bet some reader out there can be of assistance in this matter.

Sincerely,

Z. Heraclitus Knox

***

Dear Doc Knox:

I have a Bible signed in front by Sarah Rickey 1826. Inside it says "Joseph Rickey born 1760 his wife Elizabeth born 1773." -- Inside, very hard to read. Knoxville folks?

Thanks,

Carl Brewer

Dear Mr. Brewer:

'Twould be hard to know without some census research, which is the sort of thing that owners of such artifacts sometimes find time for. The people at the McClung Collection in the East Tennessee History Center can help you with that.

All we can say is that we know of no one by that name who was especially well-known in Knoxville then. Dr. Knox does not recall them personally, and they don't show up in our indexes. That's not to say they weren't nice people.

The odds are probably against Ms. Rickey's being a Knoxvillian, because in 1826 Knoxvillians were very rare and endangered creatures indeed. There were only about 1,500 Knoxvillians in the whole world. Even if we know Ms. Rickey was in Tennessee in 1826, back then fewer than one-half of 1 percent of Tennesseans were Knoxvillians. Knoxville had lost its status as a capital city, the reason it had been founded. It had no railroad in 1826, and no prospects of getting one any time soon. It had no effective steamboat traffic. It was a leftover remnant of Jeffersonian days, stranded in a remote valley. Life in Knoxville in 1826 required strong spirits, or some faith--hence, a Bible--or both.

Therefore, our answer is a firm Maybe.

Yours truly,

Z. Heraclitus Knox

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So What Buildings Got Knocked Down to Build the Whittle HQ Downtown?

2011-06-15T20:16:08Z

Dear Doc Knox,

What historic buildings gave way to the former Whittle Communications building, now the Howard Baker Federal Courthouse, and was there protest at the time to try to save those buildings?

Thank you,

Jennifer Corum

My Dear Mlle. Corum:

The shortest answer is hardly any, and not much. But it turns out to be just a bit more complicated than we remember.

Whittle Communications--we may now be obliged to define it, for those who weren't around in those heady days--was an unusual national publishing company, a maverick magazine factory that grew rapidly for 20 years before Chris Whittle built his Georgian collegiate-palatial building facing Main Street in 1991.

At the time, Whittle was getting involved in television production and, astonishingly, national private education (the Edison Project). Whittle was trendy and high tech, and his potential seemed to have no bounds in 1991. He convinced the city to offer him unusual allowances, to condemn some buildings by eminent domain and close a street to through traffic, in order to secure this headquarters of a stylish company with global prospects. (He even persuaded the city to rename Main Avenue "Main Street.") The building, a combination of state-of-the-art wiring and throwback architecture (windows with sashes!) hosted the main editorial offices for about 20 Whittle publications, and was intended eventually to house television studios for Whittle's growing video empire, which included his company's creation, the educational innovation--or outrage, to some--Channel One. Those TV parts of the building, mainly the wing to the east of the Main Street gate, were never occupied. But most of the building was a glamorously bustling place for three or four years, as Whittle employees like former Yale president Benno Schmidt, former Fortune magazine editor Bill Rukeyser, and former Carter-administration aide Hamilton Jordan, made lots of important phone calls therein, and sent some of the first e-mails in Knoxville history.

The city's submission to Whittle's desires was unprecedented. Previously, no business had succeeded in persuading Knoxville to permanently close an important downtown street for a private development. It helped Whittle's case that the two square blocks in question weren't much to look at anyway. If it wasn't blighted, it was just a broken beer bottle away from it. Fully half the site was already given up to asphalt surface parking, a predominance of which is the first clue that there's not much going on in this town.

Among the actual buildings in the way were the Gateway bookstore, which looked something like an oversized FEMA trailer, and the Trailways bus terminal, then only about 30 years old, but a bit of an eyesore, by 1980s standards. By now the bus station might offer some retro charm, but back then, the public might have hailed anybody's plan to build nearly anything else there.

Still, the project did raise quite a stink when it was unveiled 1986, as one displaced tenant threatened to "start World War III" over the erasure of two city blocks. But not so much over the historic value of the buildings.

The most fervent objections came from those owners and tenants who depended on these two blocks for their livelihoods. Businesses who objected most strongly included the original Lunch Box restaurant, a small, one-story building facing Main, and three law firms displaced by the plan. The fiercest objector was the law firm of Hodges, Doughty & Carson, owners of a classically styled two-story brick building on Main. They protested not because their building was historically old, but because it was almost brand new, just months after an expansive renovation. And its location, directly across from the courthouse, was more than ideal for lawyers.

Among the other firms who protested their relocation were that of a former Knoxville mayor, Morrison, Morrison, Tyree & Dickenson, and O'Neil, Parker, and Williamson; the latter firm was accommodated in the Whittle building itself, near the site of their original offices, as its only non-Whittle occupants. (That firm has recently swapped their unique status for a new West Knoxville location.)

None protested so vociferously as Hodges, Doughty, & Carson, which, 24 years ago this summer, seemed to stand squarely between Chris Whittle and his fondest dream. They struck an 11th-hour agreement, though, and that firm occupied a new building on the corner of Henley and Main.

Anyway. To answer your question, Mlle. Corum, with buildings that have been gone for more than two decades--demolitions were completed in 1988--it's hard even for Dr. Knox to know for certain whether some parts of the original Lunch Box, at 419 Main, say--or the Greater Tennessee Building, at 810 Market Street--were older or more historic than the average Whittle yuppie.

Of the doomed buildings, only one was ever mentioned as "historic" in newspaper accounts, and then only in passing. It was one then called the East Tennessee Title Agency Building, a two-story brick building at 813 Market Street. Built in the 1920s, it had been the longtime headquarters of Baumann & Baumann, once Knoxville's best-known architectural firm. It was old enough to be considered historic, and had some real provenance. But what did it look like? To be honest, we don't remember.

Preservationist architect Gene Burr did remark on that building's historic interest, but it doesn't seem to have aroused much passion. Knoxville's most prominent preservationist, Kristopher Kendrick, was enthusiastic about the Whittle project.

To some, especially on the Metropolitan Planning Commission, the Whittle construction's biggest casualty was not a building, but that block of Market Street, itself. Known before World War I as Prince Street, it once went all the way through to both Main and Hill, and at one time even descended to the river wharves, connecting them directly to Market Square. In 1987, MPC pushed for agreements from Whittle to maintain public pedestrian access along the route of old Market Street during "reasonable business hours." Back then, downtown business hours were pretty much just daytime on weekdays. So today the federal courthouse's courtyard, which was once part of Market Street, is gated all weekend and after 7 p.m. on weekdays. Thus, it keeps Whittle's agreement by staying accessible to the public during "reasonable business hours," 1987-style.

Previous buildings on that double-block site did include several historic ones, all of which were gone decades before the Whittle project was a twinkle in anyone's eye: the Civil War-era Knox County Courthouse, which had been torn down in the 1880s; the Women's Building, destroyed by fire in the early 20th century; and the once-famous quonset-hut-style Auditorium and rollerskating rink, which later became a streetcar barn. It was torn down by 1950, and the Trailways terminal was built on its site.

After all that disruption, Whittle Communications sputtered and downsized, jettisoning most of its magazines. The Whittle Building, object of so much high-flying hope and bitter anger 25 years ago, served as Whittle Communications headquarters for barely four years. The building was later converted into the Howard Baker Federal Courthouse.

Whittle, for whatever faults he might have had as a global dreamer, seems to have been sensitive to historic structures. A bird's eye view of the Whittle building will show how deftly his architects avoided impinging on the James Park House on one end and the Bijou Theatre on the other. One part of the substantial-looking building near the Park House is very narrow to a degree that's almost illusory. Though it looks substantial from both sides, it's barely wide enough for a corridor. Both historic buildings are, incidentally, in better shape today than they were in 1991.

But it's odd to consider that what was, long ago, the Whittle Building, which looks like a 17th-century British college and which does have some dramatic history--up to and including the dramatic visit from Mrs. Sarah Palin last year--won't be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places for another three decades.

Yr. Obt. Svt.,

Z. Heraclitus Knox

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Cherokee: Knoxville's Atlantis

2011-03-28T14:04:45Z

Dear Doc Knox:

In our office we have a map on the wall showing Knox County in 1895. On the horseshoe bend on the south side of the Tennessee River (the site of the former UT Ag Farm), west of what is now the Buck Karnes Bridge, a street grid is shown similar to downtown. The area is labeled "CHEROKEE." I wasn't around in 1895, but my memory goes back to the late 1940s, and I do not recall ever seeing any development there except barns and fields for the university. Was this developed at one time?

John Dempster

My Dear Mr. Dempster:

It's a timely question, considering the university's high-tech Cherokee Farm campus project on that very site, and it has a pretty fascinating answer. We wonder what those bulldozers might be turning up.

The map you refer to is one of our favorites. A framed color copy hangs on the wall of the Calvin McClung Collection, and oft distracts Dr. Knox from his important investigations. In general, the street layouts seem accurate, not indicating streets where none existed. Cherokee may well be an exception. Think of it as our Atlantis.

The Cherokee anomaly has puzzled us for years--that river peninsula grid of blocks, yes, like a downtown, but a perfect sort of downtown, with river views on three sides.

Like most perfect things, Cherokee probably never existed. It may never have been anything but a community of cattle, enjoying these picturesque pastures.

The Cherokee Addition first appears in detail in a wonderful promotional insert published in the Knoxville Tribune in 1891. Cherokee was to be a 60-square-block development with several hundred homes, a couple of parks, and six boat landings, spaced all the way around the peninsula. Part of the eastern shore was to be called Manhattan Beach. It was carefully planned around a central circle. Wrapping around the whole thing, along the waterfront, were two parallel boulevards in a concentric design: East and West Esplanade on the outside, and East and West Boulevard on the inside. Other streets were named for Eastern Indian terms, like Muskingum, Delaware, Narragansett, Swananoah. One of the small parks was to be called Alabama Park. (It probably didn't seem odd, as it was long before any football rivalry that would make such a name suspect.)

The promotional literature gives us a glimpse of the paradise contemplated: West Knoxville--what we now think of as Fort Sanders--"is rapidly growing in population, constantly increasing the number of her handsome residences, while CHEROKEE, her charming sister, separated from West Knoxville only by the Tennessee River, will be joined to her by the Company's magnificent steel bridge, to be completed January 1, 1892, which will be the handsomest highway bridge in the South." (That part was built; the bridge, sometimes known as the "Cherokee Bridge," was apparently torn down in the 1930s.)

"With magnificent scenery, beautiful parks, lovely drives, modern sanitary improvement, water from nature's purest springs, gas, electric lights and electric cars to the business center of the city, investments in Cherokee property will bring handsome returns. In addition to these advantages, the company's steamer, Vollette, will make regular trips every hour from the foot of Gay Street to the property."

One of the prospective developers, the president of the Cherokee Land Co., was J.C.J. Williams, prominent East Knoxvillian whose onetime home still stands on Riverside Drive. A judge and sometime city alderman, he was a great-uncle of playwright Tennessee Williams.

Cherokee appears in at least two maps from 1895, as if it already existed. One map indicates street names similar to those in the 1891 plan. However, in neither map was the street layout as elaborate as in the original plans. We suspect the pocket depression known as the Panic of 1893 played a role in amending plans, and eventually spoiling them.

Cherokee was a development planned but never completed. That's the opinion of Knoxville historian Ron Allen, who mentions the "Cherokee Addition" in his book, Knox-stalgia, an interesting compendium of details about not-quite-forgotten Knoxville places. Mr. Allen refers to Cherokee as a "failed residential community." Though streets were graded, he claims no homes were ever built on the site. We find no reason to argue.

Allen notes that Cherokee seems to have given up the ghost in 1896. He says other speculators owned it before Knox County bought it in 1915 to donate to the University of Tennessee, which has controlled it ever since.

The nomenclature is provocative. Hardly anything in Knoxville was ever named Cherokee before 1890. But then, perhaps beginning with this development, the word Cherokee came into vogue. Downtown's Cherokee Building followed, then Cherokee Country Club in 1907, followed a few years later by Cherokee Boulevard, ca. 1925, within view of the lost community of Cherokee. In some ways, Sequoyah Hills, with its parks, Indian names, and circumferential boulevard may be a watered-down version of the paradise once offered by Cherokee.

And somehow the name Cherokee has hung onto that particular peninsula, from the Cherokee dream of 1891 to the Cherokee Farm development of the 21st century.

Yr. Obt. Svt.,

Z. Heraclitus Knox

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Fountain City's Storied William Armstrong Allredge Conner

2011-03-10T20:14:32Z

Dear Doc Knox:

I recently moved to Conner Drive in Fountain City. I believe Conner Drive was named for the Conner family whose home once stood where Mynatt's Funeral Home is now located, which is at the corner of Conner and Rennoc (which is Conner spelled backwards). Is there a story as to why this street is named Rennoc?

Just Curious

My Dear J. Curious:

For this one, we were obliged to consult with our Fountain City guru, Dr. Jim Tumblin, historian and mystic keeper of the lore and legend of Fountain City. Dr. Tumblin is, unlike some who employ that honorific, an actual doctor, a retired optometrist. We assumed he'd know this subject well, and as it happens, he does.

Irish immigrant John Adair was more or less Fountain City's founding father, the first major settler there, in the 1790s. His granddaughter was named Emily Alzira Smith (1832-97); in 1850, she married an industrious local fellow named William Armstrong Allredge Conner.

A frugal, hard-working chap, Conner (1823-1905) lived in a log cabin for several years before commencing construction on what was then an imposing mansion.

When the Civil War came along, he tried to mind his own business, but in 1862, the Confederates conscripted Conner, then a 39-year-old father with several children, against his will. He escaped to Kentucky, where he stayed for about a year until Knox County was in Union hands.

Almost immediately upon his return he became a Justice of the Peace, and, in 1875, served a term as a member of Knox County Court, the county's legislative body. Conner was involved in building the first Tazewell-Jacksboro Turnpike from downtown Knoxville, and it was a pretty big deal. They paid themselves back for the investment by making it a toll road, which still seems like the most reasonable way to finance road construction and maintenance.

Dr. Tumblin reports, "when the Adair property was divided (1887, as I remember) the W.A.A. Conners inherited a giant plat that extended from [what's now] the Colonel's Liquor Store (at Hillcrest and Broadway) to the Smithwood Baptist Church. Their home is the shell that became Mynatt's Funeral Home on Rennoc Road." At the time, Fountain City was mainly a resort, the Victorian-era equivalent of a spa, usually visited by way of Knoxville, with the old Fountain Head Hotel at its nucleus.

It was, for better or worse, regarded as a sanctuary for refugees from the mosquito-borne epidemics of the Deep South, though many, having arrived, didn't survive. By one account, Conner helped bury victims of a Memphis yellow-fever epidemic in the 1870s.

By the time they built the famous steam "Dummy Line" from Knoxville to the Fountain Head Hotel in 1890, one of the last stops, by the then-elderly W.A.A. Conner's property, was Conner Station.

He outlived his wife, and lived to the age of 82. He died the same year the Dummy Line that serviced his property was transformed into an electric streetcar line.

Conner and his wife had 10 children in all, which never hurts in terms of immortalizing your name. And it turns out that Dr. Tumblin himself is a great-great nephew of W.A.A. Conner. (Following is Dr. Tumblin's own article about old man Conner.)

Dr. Tumblin's not sure when the streets were so named, and library sources for this spot so far outside of what was then city limits are patchy, but he suspects it may not have been until long after Mr. Conner's era, perhaps as late as the 1930s.

Soon there was also a Conner Road, and, as Dr. Tumblin explains, the only way to further honor Mr. Conner without confusing people with a proliferation of Conners was, when establishing another street in his honor, to spell his name backwards.

Spelling a word backwards is a handy way to pick a new name without going to the trouble of thinking of one. We have a friend who owned a cat named Lartnec. It was a stray she'd found prowling along Central. Hence Lartnec. It's an effective technique. Try it at home!

Yr. obt. svt.,

Z. Sutilcareh Xonk

For Further Reference:

"Fountain Citians Who Made A Difference" by J.C. (Jim) Tumblin, OD, DOS

Let Doc Knox answer your most intimate historical questions. Send queries to editor@metropulse.com

How to Research Your Historic House's Past (Extended Version)

2011-03-10T20:05:42Z

Dear Doc Knox:

My husband and I moved into an historic home in Old North Knoxville this past July. We are interested in finding out the history of the home, but so far, haven't been able to find much besides the names of former owners. Do you know anything about our house? And do you have any advice for other historic home owners who want to research? We'd be thankful for any advice or information you could provide!

Becca and Russell McCurdy

My Dear McCurdys:

You can easily spend hours finding interesting stuff about the history of one house and the people who lived there, especially in Old North, one of Knoxville's most interesting historic neighborhoods.

Originally known as North Knoxville, Old North was one of the early suburbs known in retrospect as "trolleyburbs." North Knoxville was incorporated as its own mini city until it was incorporated into Knoxville proper in 1897. Sounds like your house was built just after that.

Much of Old North, especially the western side of it, was oriented toward the Brookside Mills, the huge knitting mill off Baxter just west of Central. Both executives and workers lived in your neighborhood, in houses of different eminences. Your house is closer to Broadway, though, and assuming your note about the house's alternate address is correct, its original resident had an intimate association with a Broadway legend. More about that in a minute.

First, as requested, here's a primer to looking up the history of any house in Knoxville:

Go to the (Calvin M.) McClung (Historical) Collection in the History Center downtown. (As we have clarified previously, it is not related to, or to be confused with, the McClung Museum at UT. They're even named after different McClungs.) The McClung Collection is an annex of the Knox County Public Library system, and it works like a big reference library. The only difference between it and any library is that (a.) you have to sign in (b.) you can't carry anything in bigger than a notebook (they furnish free lockers for handbags, briefcases, etc.) and (c.) you can't check anything out. Once you get used to those three simple rules, it's a jolly place to visit.

First, look up your address in the city directories. Published every year since the 1800s, they allow you to look up residences by address. At McClung, they're bound from 1901 to present, and on microfilm before that. The earliest one for Knoxville was published in 1859, whereafter they appeared sporadically, but they began to be published regularly in the 1880s, and improved in the 1890s.

One tip: Because number and even street addresses sometimes changed, it's a good idea to research backwards--that is, start in familiar times, when you're sure of the address. And just start going back, year by year, or every five years if you're in a hurry. Write down the names of each resident listed. Also observe the nearest cross streets. In the same book, look up those names, and see what they did for a living, and where they worked. Sometimes also listed are names of spouses. And, if relevant, the same book may have further information about that person's employer.

If things start to look screwy, and you think you're lost, chances are you've hit a year when the addresses changed. So this time ignore the number addresses for a moment and look at patterns of specific neighbors, as well as cross streets. That way you can usually figure out the previous number address. Keep at it, going backward, until your house vanishes. That's probably close to the year it was built.

With that information, in the same cool place, take the names you've found and ask a librarian's help to see the biographical files, a combination of clippings from old scrapbooks and clippings made by librarians in recent decades. Most people who died in Knoxville between about 1940 and 2000 seem to have at least a short obituary clipping. Those who died before that are longer shots, but prominent citizens are likely to have something.

This step doesn't always pan out, but you're likely to be surprised by how much you'll learn. Death notices were once much more personal than they are today.

Then you can find further information about your quarry's employer, via the business files in the vertical-file section. These are accessible to the patron, but you may want to ask for help. There's also a little-known card-catalogue directory to business advertisements.

Still another option: also look up names of residents in the cemetery directory, a painstaking listing of the individual grave inscriptions in most (but not all) of the cemeteries in Knox County, arranged in card-catalogue form. If you don't find it, your quarry may have been buried elsewhere, a childhood home, perhaps; but some graveyards, including some large ones, like Greenwood, aren't listed there. If you learn that your resident might have been buried in one of those, ask a librarian for help.

Also, there's the census records. It's a little more complicated step that requires cross-indexing and more than one roll of microfilm. A lot of this has become possible online now, but Dr. Knox hasn't yet gotten handy with that option. Census information is minimal, and usually doesn't add much color, but it turns up information sometimes obscure elsewhere, like the presence of children, and their names and ages.

Finally, have a look at the old Sanborn fire-insurance maps. These offer detail of a degree that amazes people who've never used them. You could call them the Google Earth of their time, but in fact they offered more information than Google Earth. From roughly the 1880s to the 1960s, the Sanborn company made painstaking maps of cities, showing the precise architectural layout of each house in a city. They show how tall they were, what they were made of, where the windows and doors and bedrooms and kitchen were. They're in the original big-book format at McClung, but now you can also access them online.

The only thing to keep in mind is that dates aren't exact. These weren't intended to be historical records, and over the years they were all amended with scissors and paste, usually without noting the date of the change, or leaving any record of what was being pasted over.

By the way, Knox Heritage hosts an annual workshop for showing homeowners how to research the history of their historic houses. The next one will be held Saturday, April 9, at 10 a.m., as luck has it, in your neighborhood--at the Time Warp Tea Room. Seasoned KH researcher Hollie Cook will preside.

In his quest to provide the greatest good for the greatest audience of the curious, Dr. Knox doesn't do much in the way of private-home research, but couldn't resist having a look at this one. It appears the original resident was one Edward Coykendall--who was manager of the once-beloved Fountain Head Railroad. The steam-driven line started at what was then known as the Central Market--now Emory Place--where the Fountain Head RR offices were. (Mr. Coykendall could easily have walked to work.) From there, the small train proceeded 5.75 miles north to the Fountainhead, now known as Fountain City Park. Back then, Fountain City was not so much a residential area as a resort, with a hotel and park and heart-shaped duck pond, popular to travelers but also to Knoxvillians seeking a refuge from the noise and filth of the recklessly growing city.

The train was known as the "Dummy Line," for reasons now obscure, except that it has something to do with the fact that the train appeared to lack an engine--its steam engine was enclosed in a box to make it resemble an ordinary car, on the theory that it would be less frightening to horses in city streets. On special occasions, like Fourth of July and Labor Day, the train would work double duty, sometimes late into the night, ferrying passengers--as many as 10,000 a day--to and from picnics, dances, baseball games and other sporting events. Fare was a dime one way, 15 cents round trip, and typically took about half an hour, with multiple stops.

The Dummy Line was converted into a regular electric streetcar line in 1905. Coykendall remained in the house after that, working as an executive for a clothing manufacturer, Royal, based on West Jackson. You can certainly learn a whole lot more about him and his successors in your new home, at the McClung Collection.

We hope that gives you a start.

Yr. Obt. Svt.,

Z. Heraclitus Knox

Send your historical inquiries to: editor@metropulse.com, addressed to the good doctor.

Answers for the Curious Students of Garden Montessori

2011-01-27T21:06:06Z

Readers:

We recently received a parcel of letters from students at the Garden Montessori School, and have endeavored to answer each as it appeared on the polished surface of our fine mahogany desk. Though the doctor has a one-question rule, he was touched by the appearance of actual handwriting on actual paper, and allowed this one exception.

---

Dear Dr. Knox,

Why did you choose to write about Knoxville? Why do you put your stories in Metro Pulse? What do you like about Knoxville?

Gabe

I put my stories in Metro Pulse chiefly because that publication's editor, Mr. Coury Turczyn, permits me to, and because some people who read Metro Pulse seem to like to read them. I think healthy cities are cities that have some sense of their own history, and I want to be sure my home town knows its own stories.

I like lots of things about Knoxville, such as all the fun things to do downtown, special events like First Night and the Rossini Festival, and interesting and unusual places like the Savage Garden, which is right beside your school. I like how green it is in the spring and summer, and how we have interesting weather; it gets very hot here, and sometimes very cold. I like the fact that we have lakes and mountains in the area, and a big river going through the middle of it all. I like to go to the opera and the symphony. I like the fact that the city's history is complicated, and produces lots of surprising stories. But I especially like all the

interesting people who ask me questions.

----

Dear Doc Knox,

What year was Knoxville founded?

From,

Moe

Dear Doc Knox,

Do you know how old downtown is?

Mitty

Mitty and Moe's questions have approximately the same answer, because for several decades in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, downtown and Knoxville were approximately the same thing.

This year, Knoxville will turn 220 years old. James White built a mill and a fort on the site now occupied by the State Street Garage in the late 1780s, but it didn't look much like a town until sometime after September, 1791. That was when James White hosted a lottery in which he sold lots for people to build houses and businesses on an orderly pattern. That event is considered to be the founding of Knoxville. His son-in-law, Charles McClung, was involved in laying out some of the first streets.

Most cities start very quietly, as a tiny place no one ever heard of, but which grow to be important later. Knoxville wasn't like that. Knoxville was an important town right away because, from the day it was founded, it was capital of the Southwestern Territory, a very large part of America administered by the Washington administration. The Southwestern Territory included all of what's Tennessee today and some more land to the south of it. In 1796, representatives from across the territory came to Knoxville to found a state, and then Knoxville became Tennessee's first capital, just as it had been capital of the Southwestern Territory. It was all that activity that got the town going. Knoxville remained the state capital for more than 20 years, but in 1819 the capital moved to Middle Tennessee to be more central to the whole state.

And now we come to the issue of "downtown." Before the Civil War, even though Knoxville was sometimes important, it was very small. If you said you were "going to Knoxville," you were going to what we think of as downtown. Knoxville was just a square of land on the north side of the river. Most of the rest of Knox County was farms and forests. Even UT was not exactly in Knoxville. Downtown was Knoxville, and it was founded in 1791, too. However, it probably didn't seem much like a downtown, with sidewalks and streetlights and theaters and lots of big buildings close together, until later. Market Square started in 1854, about the same time the city got streetlights and paved roads. By the 1870s, downtown had a big theater and streetcars and hotels and lots of big stores that just got bigger and bigger as the years went on.

If you want to see what downtown looked like back in the late 1800s, Market Square and the Old City are the best places to look. There used to be buildings like that, brick buildings two, three, and four stories tall, all over downtown. The city started building tall buildings--more than four stories, anyway--starting around 1890.

----

Dear Doc Knox:

I live on Ellistown Road. Do you know when it was built?

S. Elizabeth McConnell

That question is very easy to answer, and the answer is no, I do not know.

Ellistown Road, sometimes called Ellistown Pike, is in northeast Knox County, running from the Maloneyville area along Washington Pike, southeast to Ellistown, crossing Rutledge Pike, just north of the Holston River, near the historic community of McMillan Station.

Because it had always been well outside of Knoxville's city limits, Ellistown Road isn't listed in the old City Directories at the library, which tell us very much about the history of roads in the city. We checked with some old-timers in that area, and didn't find anyone who knew for certain.

However, your road does appear on some old maps. My minions did some spot-checking of maps on file at the McClung Collection, and found Ellistown Road on a 1941 map of Knox County. However, it appears to have different shape from the modern-day Ellistown Road. Traveling north on it back then, you'd swerves strongly to the right--the east--before encountering Washington Pike.

Other roads linking the Holston River with Washington Pike appear in that general area, one on an early automobile-club map in 1927, and another as early as 1895, but they're not clearly named, and it appears as if each one has a different shape from the one before.

On an earlier map, from 1887, no such road appears at all, connecting Rutledge Pike and Washington Pike. So either those Victorian mapmakers missed it, or that cross-road was first built sometime after that.

So our estimate is that a road serving the general purpose of Ellistown Road first appeared around 1890, but changed a lot over the years, and was definitely named Ellistown Road sometime before World War II. We bet it's something you can learn even more about than Dr. Knox knows, by talking to your older neighbors and looking through some more old maps at the library.

----

Dear Doc Knox,

Why was the Lonsdale community named that?

Kaitlynn A. Fields

Lonsdale was originally a suburban community, on the northwest side of Knoxville, outside of city limits.

A community called Lonsdale was there by the 1890s. The development was kind of unusual because the streets were all named for states, with streets named for Civil War generals from both sides, mixed together. It was not officially a part of the city of Knoxville until a huge annexation in 1917.

Not all sources agree about every detail, but it's said to have been named by a real-estate developer named Will Ragsdale, who wanted to pick a name that would honor both his mother, whose maiden name was Lonas, and his father, whose last name was Ragsdale. So he called it Lonasdale. But people liked to say it a little faster, and write it a little quicker, so over the years, it got shortened to Lonsdale.

That's one story. By another story, Ragsdale shortened it, himself, to begin with. It might have been a tough thing to explain to his mother, that he was reducing her family name by 20 percent.

There's something kind of funny about all that. You'd think that combining parts of two last names, and then dropping a letter, would result in a strange word that doesn't exist anywhere else. You might try that in your class, and see what crazy-sounding names you come up with.

But Lonsdale, spelled that way, is a famous English last name. There's an Earl of Lonsdale, and a Lonsdale Square in London. There's a Lonsdale Belt, which is an award for boxing in Great Britain, and a Lonsdale Cup, which is an award for horseracing. There are lots of places in England, Australia, and Canada named Lonsdale. It sounds pretty fancy, and sometimes that's all it takes to make a name for a community that sounds good. and maybe it would have sounded like a good name even if the guy's parents didn't have those names.

The split-last-name story may be true, as far as we know, but we bet he was influenced by the lordly ring of Lonsdale. If a developer named Fred Kallangitang, whose mother's name was Borrulible, had picked the name Lonsdale, it would not have been unusual. Then and now, developers like to use names of British earls for developments.

In East Knoxville is a place called Burlington, which was developed at about the same time as Lonsdale. Nobody seems to know where it came from; people have wondered for years. But there's also an Earl of Burlington.

With profoundest esteem, and best wishes to you in your further studies,

Z. Heraclitus Knox, 7th Earl of Lordingdale

Come one, come all! Dr. Knox answers your questions regarding the history of the Knoxville metropolis. Send all your queries, big or small, toeditorATmetropulseDOTcom.