Knoxville Chronicles

Since its earliest days, Knoxville has considered the Fourth of July to be a cause for much celebration. The first event occurred in 1793, just two years after the city was founded, at the Knoxville Blockhouse (where the Knox County Courthouse stands today) when a parade of soldiers kicked off proceedings with a “federal salute” before a banquet ensued with prominent guests toasting a lengthy list...

Even if you’ve never dared to try it, almost everyone knows what Mountain Dew is. Its sci-fi nuclear-green color and barely legal caffeine content gave it a reputation as one of the more extreme soft drinks, at least before the energy-drink era. Its name was meant as a jokey reference to an old nickname for moonshine. There’s now an official state historical marker on Magnolia Avenue that tells th...

The steps of the Dr. John Mason Boyd memorial arch, located on the southwest corner of Gay Street at Main, offer a fine perch to ponder bygone times in this old section of downtown. Dr. Boyd enjoyed a long and respectable career here, known in his early days as a “horse and buggy” doctor, and before the Civil War, he began to specialize in the field of obstetrics.   Today, the memorial arch stands...

Just past Mead’s Quarry on Island Home Pike, less than half a mile south of the Tennessee river, the stretch of road between the quarry and Sevierville Pike, a distance of about two miles, is as peaceful as any in South Knoxville. It’s one of those neighborhoods that doesn’t appear to have a ready name of its own; few landmarks exist there today, only a few scattered houses and a couple of churche...

For decades, jazz fans in Knoxville have heard rumors of Gordon’s Town House on the corner of Cumberland Avenue and 17th Street. In the 1950s, full swing orchestras played there in its big dining room with a dance floor that looked straight out of a posh Manhattan nightclub in an old black-and-white movie. Gordon’s also had a smaller, more intimate room called the Blue Note, where you could hear m...

For many years, only intrepid explorers and hardy lumbermen were drawn to the forbidding mountains visible on the horizon from Knoxville. Despite early efforts on the North Carolina side of the Smoky Mountains in 1899, things only really got moving after Willis and Annie Davis returned to Knoxville from an inspirational trip to see some of the grand national parks out west. Fired up by the idea th...

When checking the status of a flight or whether you are heading out of town or waiting on a family member or friend to arrive, it’s handy to know the three-digit code for the Knoxville airport. Those three letters—T Y S —stand for Tyson, or more specifically, McGhee Tyson, for whom the airport is named. Even though it’s not even located in Knox County—and most people have no idea why the Knoxville...

These days, the annual Knoxville Christmas parade that rolls along Gay Street, typically on the first Friday of December, remains as popular as ever. But everything has to start somewhere, and we have to look back almost 100 years to see how it all began.  Cities of Knoxville’s size had been clamoring to get on the Christmas parade bandwagon since watching the Macy’s Christmas Parade be wildly rec...

The Knoxville area once known as the Bowery included hundreds of little shops: secondhand stores run by immigrants, some early African American barber shops and movie theaters, some of the city’s first Chinese laundries, some of the city’s last livery stables and blacksmiths, and drugstores that sold things that mainstream drugstores wouldn’t. It was also the epicenter of an underground economy, t...

For anyone who has spent much time in Knoxville, there is one thing that you’ll encounter in almost every part of the city, and that’s Tennessee marble. It graces several impressive downtown buildings, and you can see where it was once extracted at several abandoned or reclaimed quarries, particularly at Ijams Nature Center, now part of the city’s expansive Urban Wilderness in South Knoxville.  Wh...

Walk along Walnut Avenue between Union Avenue and Summit Hill Drive today and you’ll find that it’s a relatively unremarkable spot. But it was once the home of one of the city’s respected couples, Peter and Henrietta Kern, who lived here in the late 1800s within spitting distance of the hustle and bustle of their retail emporium on the southwest corner of Market Square. The Girl’s High School woul...

There are ghost walks and then there is “ghost walking.” Ghost Walking the Streets of Knoxville takes a look at life on the city’s downtown streets in bygone times; how these streets and their buildings have changed throughout the decades, and how through old pictures and stories we can glimpse the echoes of people’s past lives and particular events. In this episode, historian Paul James reads the...

This surprising story focuses on a Spanish-speaking police chief beginning in the 1850s during Knoxville’s murky antebellum era.  Christopher Columbus Carlos, a tailor-turned-policeman had a reputation as an especially tough cop—a Town Marshall even—who was so skilled with a long stick and a thrown brick that he never carried a gun. A legend in his own time, stories of Marshall Carlos continued ev...

Imagine October in Knoxville, and subtract Volmania, drives in the Smokies, and Halloween decorations, and what would you have? But on certain Octobers between 1884 and 1913, we had more creative and unpredictable fun than we ever have today.  The four-day event involved “a parade representing 65 or so local industries, 50 horse-drawn floats, a regatta on the Tennessee River, horse racing at the s...

In early 1794, barely just over two years after the town of Knoxville was established, a short but strange news item appeared in the Knoxville Gazette . A detachment of soldiers, 30 miles outside of Knoxville, encountered a “creature” that appeared nothing like they had ever seen or heard about before. And it wasn’t happy to see these soldiers in its own woods. Soon, the story was run in the Belfa...

There are some names in Knoxville history that seem rarer than others. Cansler is one. In Mechanicsville, there’s a Cansler Street, and on University Avenue, a Cansler Building. Off Western is the old Laura Cansler School, a former “colored” elementary school, now home to Wesley House. And in East Knoxville, there’s the Cansler Family YMCA.  The Cansler family had a big impact on Knoxville in the...

The elegant old weather kiosk on the corner of Clinch Avenue and Market Street looks like something built for an Exposition of the beaux-arts era. But in fact, it was originally installed in 1912, not long before Knoxville’s gigantic and elegantly appointed National Conservation Exposition of 1913.  People used to gather around it to see what the federal weatherman had observed, and what they coul...

In 1856, before the Civil War, Dr. William J. Baker, with assistance from a few others including his suffering patient, hurried medical science along a bit by performing one of the first hysterectomy surgeries in the United States here on Gay Street.    Of that historic team of four surgeons, the youngest is the one best remembered today. Knoxvillians may recognize the name, even if they don’t rem...

This short account looks back on how Knoxville’s Christmas traditions were influenced by one of the most popular authors of all time, Charles Dickens, and his most beloved story, A Christmas Carol first published in England in 1843. Written by Jack Neeley and narrated by Todd Ethridge.  Produced by the Knoxville History Project. Sound design and editing by Pete Carty. Knoxville Chronicles is broug...

This short story focuses on the ghostly happenings at an old double-house, actually two small antebellum houses linked by a vestibule, at 309 East Cumberland Avenue, on the eastern fringe of downtown. The house was torn down at the onset of Urban Renewal in 1959, but part of its story remains. Originally written by Jack Neely for the Knoxville Mercury , and narrated by Rebecca Longmire.  Produced...

The pilot episode of Knoxville Chronicles tells the story of Adolph Ochs, a kid who was scared of a graveyard while he learned the ropes of newspaper publishing here in Knoxville as a Printer’s Devil. The lad went on to become the founder of a major American institution, a cultural leader who changed a whole profession, established a landmark, and introduced a new way of celebrating a holiday. The...

This short podcast looks back on how national and local events influenced the celebration of Thanksgiving in Knoxville, connecting seemingly disparate events such as the Siege of Knoxville during the Civil War, prohibitionist Carrie Nation’s visit in 1906, and later, even UT football. Written by Jack Neely and read by Todd Ethridge  Produced by the Knoxville History Project. Sound design and editi...

Three days before Christmas in 1893, Whittle’s sawmill by the river exploded and the disaster proved to be a portent of trouble ahead on the streets of Knoxville. While for some, Christmas was a quiet, family affair, with gifts and Christmas trees, for others it was a time for looking for some fun or for some trouble. The ensuing mayhem meant that it was a Christmas period like no other. Jack Neel...

One of Knoxville’s oldest buildings, the old deaf school (now Lincoln Memorial University’s Duncan School of Law), with its 1848 date proudly on the front, still stands on Summit Hill Drive. The school had barely begun to prosper when it was commandeered during the Civil War for use as a military hospital. After the conflict, Prof. Ijams, one of the nation’s leading deaf and mute teachers, hired t...

From the day it was finished in 1903, the mortar had hardly dried between the bricks at the Southern Railway Station before people began complaining it wasn’t nearly big enough for the job. But there was one face that everyone got used to seeing every day–a woman in uniform and a white hat. Her name was Maggie Lattimore. Although she was an African American in a segregated train station, she often...