Knoxville Walking Tours

24/11/2024

Happy birth anniversary to Frances Hodgson Burnett, who started her world-famous writing carer as a teenager right here in Knoxville.

Happy Historical Birthday to Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924)! 🎂🎉

Frances was a member of an English family impoverished by the death of her father. Her widowed mother settled in Knoxville with her several children. They were living in a cheap house on a hillside in what was just becoming known as the Mechanicsville area when Frances began writing short stories for publication. Very much unlike the experience of most aspiring writers, she was successful right off the bat, selling the first of her stories at age 18. She lived in several places in town, including the riverside house she called Vagabondia Castle, as she began writing novels. She had moved away before she became famous, splitting the rest of her life between eastern cities and her native England. Several of her books, like Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden, were major bestsellers; in fact, she was sometimes described as the bestselling novelist of either gender in America.

01/11/2024

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our twelfth October of sharing ghostly history of Knoxville. We are so grateful for another great season, and wish all of you a Happy Halloween!

14/10/2024

Happy birth anniversary to Mr. Cal Johnson, still one of our most extraordinary success stories.

Happy Historic Birthday to Mr. Cal Johnson (1844 - 1925)🎂

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 recent plaques (on the Marble Alley Lofts on State Street) and murals (in Burlington) and the currently in-progress 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. It’s now in the midst of a vigorous renovation for another century of use.

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.

14/09/2024

02/09/2024

Happy Labor Day to all who work hard for a living!

Happy Labor Day!

While the city had held labor parades and festivities in previous years, Knoxville's first official Labor Day celebration (actually held on September 3rd) was in 1894 after Congress had declared it a national holiday. The massive parade that was held that year marched from downtown Gay Street all the way out to Fountain City, where there was big picnic that was enjoyed by thousands of people. Later in the afternoon a baseball game was held between the railroad workers and the iron workers.

Knoxville continued to celebrate big with the festivities eventually evolving into the annual "Boomsday" Celebration which originated in 1988. Sadley, we saw the end of this tradition in 2015.

- Labor Day Celebration, Knoxville, Tenn., Sept. 5, 1910. Floral automobile float with S.H. George & Sons sign. Stereo by C.A. Wayland, So. Knoxville, Tenn. Courtesy of The McClung Historical Collection.

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.