Knoxville Walking Tours

21/08/2024

One of our favorite art wraps, great for helping Music tour guests imagine the glittering crowds attending Staub's Theatre in its heyday.

! 📸 - Staub's Theatre by Russell Briscoe at Gay Street and W. Cumberland Avenue. Sponsored by Home Federal Bank. Photography by Mike O'Neill.

Briscoe's early creative impulses seemed limited to whimsical cartooning and, in the 1930s, an earnest effort to manufacture wooden toys and miniatures with the help of his wife, Deas. It was not until age 58, when Deas surprised him with a gift of oil paints and brushes, that Briscoe began to paint.

For the last 20 years of his life Briscoe was prolific, producing an estimated 75 meticulously detailed scenes of Knoxville, inspired by both nostalgic memories and by history as passed down to him by his elders. For him painting was a personal labor of love, happily out of step with artistic trends of the modernist era. Though he sometimes used his paintings to illustrate his talks about old Knoxville, the only exhibition of his work he ever witnessed in his lifetime was in 1972, when UT's McClung Museum presented a show of his work.

Referring to Briscoe's untrained style as "American primitive," Professor Kermit Ewing, an artist known for his experiments in abstract expressionism, remarked of Briscoe, "His fresh color, natural sense of design and thoroughness result in a personal expression of high artistic merit."

This scene shows Staub's Theater, built by Swiss immigrant Peter Staub on this corner in 1872, and hosted a wide variety of performers, from Lily Langtry to Sarah Bernhardt to W.C. Fields--as well as lecturer Frederick Douglass. This painting imagines it as it was on a gala night around 1897. It had become known as the Lyric before its demolition in 1956.

13/06/2024

Like your history on the move? Join the Downtown Walking Tour this Saturday. We're rediscovering Anne Armstrong’s 1890’s Knoxville.

In her memoir, Of Time and Knoxville, Armstrong remembers the 1890’s Knoxville of her youth, a city that enthralled her with its colorful characters and vibrant social life. Storyteller Laura Still will lead you on an exploration of the city’s elegance, squalor, and transformation on the edge of a new century.

Registration required: https://www.knoxcountylibrary.org/event/downtown-walking-tour-anne-armstrongs-1890s-knoxville-25419

16/05/2024

Anniversary of the death of one of our finest Knoxville writers-- I often wonder how much more he had to teach us, what stories he would have gone on to tell.

On , 69 years ago, we lost legendary Knoxville author, James Agee.

At just 45, he died of a heart attack in a New York taxicab. At the time, much of his most revered work--notably his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family--was unknown. The Pulitzer came only later. And it's remarkable, as busy as he was in his short life, that his name appears in print much more today than at any time in his career as a poet, critic and journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has been the subject of three book length scholarly biographies, the last one, we're proud to say, we helped a little with. Paul Brown's Rufus is the most thorough exploration of Agee's Tennessee youth ever attempted. You can find it in our online store (https://knoxville-history-project.square.site/product/rufus-james-agee-in-tennessee/38?cs=true&cst=custom)

You get extra credit if you find an empty bench and read it at James Agee Park, in the heart of Fort Sanders, at the corner of Laurel and James Agee Street.

📸 - courtesy of harvardsquarelibrary.org

07/05/2024

Lizzie was 69 years old when the Tennessee Legislature ratified the 19th Amendment, allowing women to vote all over the country, but she started her work for women's rights as a young widow. It was a long hard fight that she never gave up on, and trained the the younger generation to carry on when she was gone. Thanks, Lizzie, and happy birthday!

Happy Historic Birthday to Lizzie Crozier French! 🥳🎂🎉

Lizzie is justly remembered as Knoxville’s most influential suffragist. She helped to sway the state to vote for suffrage in 1920 (all three of Knoxville’s legislators voted as she asked them to). Considering that Tennessee turned out to be the decisive 36th state, and supported suffrage by the thinnest possible margin, it’s just possible that the whole nation wouldn’t have allowed women to vote as early as it did without Lizzie’s unremitting pressure. She gave public talks on women’s rights, hosted pro-suffrage conventions on Market Square, and had countless meetings with politicians. Daughter of a scholarly congressman, she was also an educator, once the principal of the Female Institute, an effort to bring college-quality education to women before they were allowed to attend the local university. She founded the Ossoli Circle, a literary and civic organization of women seeking to learn more about their world. French was also a broadminded public intellectual who hosted forums on a wide range of subjects, from evolution to spiritualism to Unitarianism, often in her own home on Cumberland Avenue near Locust Street. Widowed in her 20s, she accomplished much of her remarkable career as a single mother.

12/04/2024

Laura also does free tours for anyone with a library card. These are one-off special events and this month's is about the artworks on street corners, public buildings, in alleys, and green spaces. Learn about the art, and the artists, from Lloyd Branson to Beauford Delany to Megan Lingerfelt.

Want to learn more about the Knoxville's art and artists? We still have space on our Downtown Walking Tour with Laura Still. This Saturday, April 13 at 2:30. Registration link in the comments

05/04/2024

Happy birthday to our favorite Disney princess!

Always a popular post, as she is a well-loved Knoxville icon, a very happy birthday to grande dame of local opera, Mrs. Mary Costa!

She'd be famous as a Met soprano, and she had a small acting career in film, and made occasional appearances on high-profile TV shows in the 1960s--but for many, she will always be the singing voice of Disney's 1959 animated film, Sleeping Beauty. She grew up in East and North Knoxville, and got her first singing experience at the First Baptist Church in downtown Knoxville. She returned to her hometown to play a major role in launching the Knoxville Opera.

12/02/2024

An early blues songstress we never got to hear--sure would like to find out the story behind "Killing Your Man Blues!"

Odessa Cansler was born in 1907 in Martel, Tenn., a rural community between Lenoir City and Concord. She moved with her close-knit family into Knoxville proper when she was a girl. She befriended some musicians in East Knoxville and developed a reputation as a blues singer. She apparently had reason to be confident of her talent, because at age 22, she accompanied her older friend Leola Manning to the St. James Hotel near Market Square to make some records for the big Brunswick-Vocalion project. The date was Aug. 28, 1929. One of the songs she sang into the microphone for producer Mr. Voynow was "Change Your Mind Blues." Another was "Killing Your Man Blues." There may have been more. But while her friend Leola's recordings caused a bit of a stir, none of Odessa's were pressed or released
for sale. Scholars can only guess why. Researchers say the numeric notations for her session are "unusual." Appalachian music scholar Ted Olson has proposed that there may have been technical problems, or that maybe Odessa's style of "urban blues" was not what they were looking for. So she didn’t get her big break, and we don't know what she sounded like. Still, she rates a full page in the 2016 box-set release, The Knoxville Sessions. She lived a long life, dying in Knoxville at the age of 84 in 1991.

📸 - Jazz-age singers Leola Manning, left, and Odessa Cansler, right, both recorded blues songs at the St. James Hotel in 1929. In between is Odessa's brother, George Cansler. Courtesy of Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound.

10/01/2024

Laura has a poem and a history story in the Winter issue of ReView, the new online ezine published by the Knoxville Writers' Guild.

Visit the post for more.

20/12/2023

Today, 180 years ago, Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol was published. The influence of this timeless story on Knoxville is hard to overstate, as our guests on the Holiday History tour this morning found out. So glad to do this tour on the anniversary!

11/12/2023

The Tennessee School for the Deaf building had been used as a hospital first for the Confederate troops, than for the Union troops during the Civil War, which was why it was in such rough shape when Joseph Ijams came to Knoxville to take the job of principal in 1866. He managed to revive the school and its reputation with 16 years of hard work and dedication. He was revered by his students, faculty, and the townspeople in general, and all mourned his sudden death.

Happy Historical Birthday to Joseph Ijams! 🎂

Joseph was born in Rushville, Ohio and studied at both Iowa State and Michigan State Universities. At the age of 19 began teaching at the "Iowa Institute for the Deaf and Dumb", followed by the "National Deaf-Mute College" in Washington DC. He moved to Knoxville after the war in 1866 to be the superintendent of the "Tennessee Deaf and Dumb School". When he arrived the campus was in dreadful shape and had no registered students. During his 16 years as superintendent and he made a clear impact at the school and is clearly credited for bringing the institution back to prominence after the Civil War. Professor Ijams fell ill and died in December 1882. His son Harry later purchased land on the southside of the river and built a home and gardens, which are now the Ijams Nature Center.

29/11/2023

It's been 160 years since the battle of Fort Sanders, when Union troops defending Knoxville scored a resounding victory over Confederate troops under General James Longstreet, who would offer to resign over his disastrous mistakes in Knoxville. No traces of the battlefield remain, but it's worth a moment of remembrance on this bright and chilly day.

14/10/2023

It's the birth anniversary of one of my favorite Knoxville businessmen, who might still be hanging around State Street, if the stories are true! Come find out more about that on our Ghosts of the Old City tour.

Happy Historical Birthday to Cal Johnson! 🎂🥳

Johnson was an extraordinary fellow who enjoyed the most astonishing business career in Knoxville history. Born into slavery and emancipated as a teenager, he parlayed some good fortune, lots of hard work, and imagination into profitable investments in real estate, the creation of a chain of saloons serving both black and white customers, and the construction of industrial and commercial buildings (he owned one of the first three or four movie theaters in Knoxville history), perhaps culminating in his pride and joy, Johnson’s Racetrack, Knoxville’s most exciting horse-racing venue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—that also hosted, in 1910, the first-ever airplane landing in Knoxville history.

Today Johnson may be better known than he has been at any time since he was alive, with plaques (on the Marble Alley Lofts on State Street) and murals (in Burlington) and the Cal Johnson Building: the old clothing factory on State Street which, throughout all its personae as a pioneer car dealership and a warehouse, always had Johnson’s name carved in marble, high on the facade.

Have a look at that building, or take a turn around Speedway Circle, the half-mile oval that still exists, though it’s now a Burlington residential neighborhood. If you don’t have a horse, it’s now paved for the convenience of automobiles.

To learn more about Cal Johnson check out: https://knoxvillehistoryproject.org/cal-johnson/

20/09/2023

Coming up in October!

10/08/2023

This year's History Hootenanny will have three tours for you to choose from:

Laura Still of Knoxville Walking Tours will lead "Knoxville Goes to the Movies" at 10 am

The staff of the East Tennessee History Center will lead a tour of the History Center at 11 am.

and Jack Neely of The Knoxville History Project will lead "A Conservation Centennial Hike" at noon.

Visit our website for a full list of History Hootenanny activities. https://easttnhistory.org/events/history-hootenanny

09/07/2023

Laura Still’s “Lost Valley of Hardin” will appear in “23 Tales: Appalachian Ghost Stories, Legends, and Other Mysteries.” The anthology will be released in September.

A native East Tennessean, Laura is a published poet, playwright, and local history author. She created Knoxville Walking Tours in 2012 and works full-time as a storyteller and walking history guide. She has researched and written 15 tours, including three ghost walks. She partners with the Knoxville History Project and proceeds from her tours support it and other history-oriented Knoxville nonprofits.

Co-owner of Celtic Cat Publishing since 2016, she has written four books: Guardians (2009), Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 1, (2010), A Haunted History of Knoxville (2014), and A Fair Shake: The Leaders of the Fight for Women’s Rights in Knoxville (2021).

09/07/2023

Laura is sharing another ghost story from Knox County with her friends at Howling Hills Publishing.

Laura Still’s “Lost Valley of Hardin” will appear in “23 Tales: Appalachian Ghost Stories, Legends, and Other Mysteries.” The anthology will be released in September.

A native East Tennessean, Laura is a published poet, playwright, and local history author. She created Knoxville Walking Tours in 2012 and works full-time as a storyteller and walking history guide. She has researched and written 15 tours, including three ghost walks. She partners with the Knoxville History Project and proceeds from her tours support it and other history-oriented Knoxville nonprofits.

Co-owner of Celtic Cat Publishing since 2016, she has written four books: Guardians (2009), Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 1, (2010), A Haunted History of Knoxville (2014), and A Fair Shake: The Leaders of the Fight for Women’s Rights in Knoxville (2021).

30/06/2023

Laura will be at Tea & Treasures as part of their Second Saturday event on July 8, 2023, from 11 am to 1 pm. Come by and join the fun!

We are thrilled to announce that Laura Still, local author, storyteller and tour guide for Knoxville Walking Tours will be our special guest at the next Tea & Treasures 2nd Saturday Marketplace event on July 8th. Laura be will sharing her special gift of storytelling and knowledge of Knoxville history from 11am-1pm. This is a treat you don’t want to miss!

#37920

25/06/2023

Happy Historical Birthday to Ruth Cobb Brice (1899-1971)!🎂💐

Brice lived in a different world and had a very different artistic career. An African American teacher who spent 47 years teaching in black public schools, she began displaying her art in public places only in the 1950s, when she was an older woman, but eventually had shows at Knoxville College, UT, and the Dulin Gallery of Art; in 1968, she became the first black artist to be accepted into the Knoxville Watercolor Society. Also a published poet, Brice, who never specialized in one form of art, was an imaginative woman who tried all sorts of genres, from surrealism to children's books. Her work is the subject of several KHP art wraps in the downtown/Magnolia area or you can see examples of her work at the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA.

07/06/2023

Happy birthday, Miss Giovanni, one of our Knoxville treasures. Can't wait to read her new book, A Street Called Mulvaney!

Happy Birthday to poet Nikki Giovanni!!! 🎂🥳💐 She was born in Knoxville in 1943 to Yolande and Jones Giovanni. The charismatic and often aggressive young voice of the Black Power movement of the 1960s proved that she had multiple facets, with some of her most tender free verse reserved for her hometown. Although it was a segregated city, she grew up in a supportive Black community that included the Gem Theatre, the Carter-Roberts Drugstore, with its remarkable jazz jukebox, and the Cal Johnson Park. Most of her neighborhood was removed and demolished during Urban Renewal, as she described in her essay, “400 Mulvaney Street,” named for the address of her grandmother, along what’s now Hall of Fame Drive. Although she spent much of her childhood with her parents in Cincinnati, she spent summers in Knoxville with her grandmother, and later attended Austin High School. One of her best-known poems, once interpreted as an illustrated children’s book, is called Knoxville, Tennessee.

26/05/2023

Back when Tennessee was the west...

On May 26, 1790, Congress established the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio (aka The Southwest Territory).

The Southwest Territory was created after the State of North Carolina ceded the nearly 43,000 square miles of land to reduce the demand the it held on the state's drained treasury and find relief from the responsibility of protecting western settlers.

Later on in 1790, President George Washington appointed William Blount as territorial governor as well as a second responsibility, superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Southern Department, an office that placed him in contact with the neighboring Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek nations. Rocky Mount served as the first capital of the territory in Washington County near the Watauga River, then relocated to Blount’s personal residence, Blount Mansion, in Knoxville in 1792.

20/05/2023

I was lucky enough to meet Wilma Dykeman at an awards banquet given in her honor by the Knoxville Writers Guild, which gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Happy Historical Birthday to Wilma Dykeman (1920 - 2006)

Even though she was never really a Knoxvillian, splitting her life between Asheville, where she was born and died, and Newport, where she also had a home-the novelist, newspaper columnist, and historian was a familiar face here, and knew Knoxville better than most Knoxvillians do. Dykeman was a News-Sentinel columnist for 38 years, and a regular lecturer at UT, the alma mater of her husband, Jim Stokely, Jr. UT Special Collections has her papers.

She was a graceful intellectual, the kind of persona who understood things because she took the time to research and contemplate in ways most of us don't; she was there to help us understand ourselves, and the regional home we share. Her 1962 novel, The Tall Woman, got national attention for its edgy and realistic depiction of one woman's life in the post-Civil War mountain South, and continues to draw commentary today. You can learn more about Wilma by visiting the website run by her son, Jim Stokely III.

19/05/2023

Happy Historical Birthday to Bernadotte Schmitt (1886 - 1969)! 🎂

The Pulitzer winner, and for a time a neighbor of the younger James Agee, had a fascination with the complexities of World War I which began when he lived in a house on the corner of White and 13th, where his father, Professor Cooper Schmitt, had lived. The UT grad's curiosity would eventually take him to Europe, and an extensive personal interview with the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm, as well as several other statesmen, resulting in his book The Coming of War, 1914, published in 1930, and recipient of the Pulitzer for History. The house where he grew up no longer stands on its original corner, but to save it from a university project, it was moved in 2015 in recent years, about two blocks to the corner of Clinch and 12th.
📸Schmitt (1905) - Courtesy of The University of Tennessee

17/05/2023

Now everyone can see one of my favorite works by a local artist, in a natural setting, thanks to the generous donors at KHP! For a short bio of the artist, click on their post.

- Peregrine Falcons by Earl Henry, located on James White Greenway at Volunteer Landing. Sponsored by RiverHill Gateway Neighborhood.

📸by Mike O'Neill

Earl Henry, a local naturalist and self-taught artist, is often better known as the Knoxville dental officer who perished on the ill-fated USS Indianapolis at the end of World War II.

After his boyhood discovery of vividly illustrated wildlife cards found inside Arm & Hammer Baking Soda boxes, Earl began drawing birds. His wooden bird carvings drew acclaim while studying at Knoxville High School. He developed the art of taxidermy while a junior member of the East Tennessee Ornithological Society and that expertise informed his painting of birds.

After studying dentistry in Memphis, Henry returned to Knoxville and set up practice in the Medical Arts Building on Main Street. In 1942, he joined the U.S. Navy, serving on active duty initially at the Naval Hospital at Parris Island in South Carolina. There, he honed his artistic ability using tempera paints on boards, and later incorporating detailed background landscapes, reminiscent of the style of John James Audubon, providing richer and more sophisticated natural settings.

Cmdr. Henry lost his life at sea at age 33. He died on July 30, 1945 aboard the USS Indianapolis shortly after the vessel delivered uranium for the first atomic bomb used in World War II. The ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sunk within 12 minutes. Henry was not among the survivors. He was one of two Knoxvillians on the ship – the other being Knoxville Journal photographer Kasey Moore. Two of Henry’s final works, “Kentucky Cardinal” and “American Eagle in the Pacific” were painted aboard ship in 1944 and his artistic legacy remains part of the ongoing story of the USS Indianapolis.

08/05/2023

A little extra on the Bijou, which has been part of Knoxville since 1817. For more about its spookier history, book one of our Shadow Side or Sidestreet Shadows ghost tours!

02/05/2023

The birth anniversary of Carl Martin, mentioned along with his bandmates on our Musical History tour.

Happy Historical Birthday to a musician whose name is unjustly forgotten. Carl Martin (1906 - 1979) was one of the most talented and hardest-working blues guitarists of the 1920s and ‘30s. Since his death in 1979, his reputation has been overshadowed by his charismatic band mate, Howard Armstrong—but during his prime, Martin was probably the better known of the two. A virtuoso guitarist in the intricate Piedmont style, Martin was nonetheless versatile enough to feature on several classic blues recordings of the Chicago era, along with Bumble Bee Slim and Tampa Red. He also did more solo recording and performing, adorning his blues with jazz flourishes: listen to “Crow Jane” or “Joe Louis Blues.”

He was born in Big Stone Gap, Va., but as you won’t learn in his Wikipedia entry, he spent most of his youth in Knoxville, where he learned to play, often performing on the streets with his older brother, fiddler “Blind Roland” Martin. Carl played guitar, mandolin, and bowed bass fiddle, of which he made an offbeat specialty for a while.

Here he met Howard Armstrong, from LaFollette, younger and more outgoing than Martin. The chums lived together in a house on old Yeager Street in East Knoxville (urban-renewalled away, it was somewhere far behind the Civic Coliseum). They played together, creating the nucleus of the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, the Four Keys, the Tennessee Trio, the Wandering Troubadours, and other bands, sometimes with their newer associate Ted Bogan. They recorded “Vine Street Rag” and “Knox County Stomp” at the St. James Hotel sessions in 1930, and also broadcast on WROL, under the name Tennessee Chocolate Drops, sometimes also playing announced shows in local nightclubs like Bearden’s Wayside Inn. They left for Chicago sometime after the summer of 1931, and offered something very different from what the Delta bluesmen were supplying.

Martin died at age 73, not necessarily young—but his irrepressible bandmate Armstrong experienced a 20-year late-life revival Martin didn’t get to enjoy. Armstrong has a festival in his memory; maybe Carl Martin deserves one, too.