(Ed. Note: Today’s article is by guest writer Paul James of the Knoxville History Project. Expect more Knoxville history from Paul in the coming months.)
There are ghost walks and then there is ghost walking. It might not be a familiar term, but it speaks to what I often do around downtown Knoxville particularly.
Working for the Knoxville History Project since 2017, I’ve become familiar with the city’s history and many of its downtown spaces. I’m not an expert on Knoxville history, but I know a man who is. I actually work with him. Jack Neely, executive director of KHP, has been researching and writing about the city’s past for more than four decades now. He’s been thinking about Knoxville for a lot longer; in fact, since before I was born.
A few years ago, as I was walking with Jack through Market Square, my thoughts drifted back to the old Market House that dominated the square with its long, turreted, building. The structure still left enough room on either side for vendors to come in, first with their horse and wagons, later with their cars.
I casually asked Jack back then if he saw the ghosts of buildings wherever he went? Of course, he’d been doing that for years.
As Director of Publishing and Development for KHP, I’ve developed an ever-growing digital collection, several boxes of vintage postcards courtesy of a most generous supporter, and a handful of old photographs, some of which already exist in the wonderful McClung Historical Collection. It’s convenient to have a few classic images on hand for a program or publication we’re working on. I suppose I’ve become rather familiar with the city’s history, a few inches deep anyway.
Having just re-read Jack’s A History of Market Square: The Most Democratic Place on Earth (Market Square District Association, 2009), the old Market House has been looming large in my mind again as I walk around.
Everywhere you go, layers of history are stacked on top of each other. As a space specifically designed to attract people and businesses, Market Square may be stacked deeper than most. Perhaps it’s not apparent to most folks, but in my mind, there are ghosts of buildings and people everywhere.
Like the shuffling on an old train station timetable, I often imagine many different eras at once, all blending in with each other.
Back when the northern edge of downtown lay along Clinch Avenue, there was an open field marked by blackberry bushes, and perhaps a few trees and whatever vegetation wasn’t gnawed on by a stray goat.
In my mind, I see young entrepreneurs William Swan and Joseph Mabry scheming to buy this land, donating the middle section to the city, hoping that the buildings that they’d own surrounding it would steadily increase in value once a public market hall was built (it was in late 1853), which like in some property deals, profits may have been slow to realize in their own lifetimes. But they were certainly forward-thinking chaps.
Talented photographer Thomas H. Smiley came to town in the 1850s and climbed the steps in the old courthouse (then on the north side of Main Street) to photograph what he could see looking north toward Sharp’s Gap. There’s not a soul in sight – Knoxville looks a bit like Colonial Williamsburg without the tourists. Within two years, the town, like everywhere else, would be plunged into Civil War. So, to my mind, the photograph has some innocence embedded in it. You can see the first market house there in the middle, more like a barn with piles of hay inside, than a bustling market. Maybe the idea hadn’t taken off yet or it was a Sunday. During the Civil War, the barn served as an armory of sorts, storing gunpowder.
As the town began to shrug off the misery and destruction associated with the passing of the conflict, the public market began to take off and the square would get its first impressive building, courtesy of a recuperating soldier who decided to stay here after making a few dollars selling hoecakes to fellow combatants–Peter Kern’s bakery, built in 1875, on the southwest corner where the Oliver Hotel and Tupelo Honey are today.
Kern’s would become locally famous as an impressive retail emporium filled with German-inspired candies (all in jars almost as far as the eye could see), and something perhaps new to Knoxvillians – Christmas trees. And if that wasn’t enough, Kern, who was born in the U.S. to German parents, raised his game by adding a soon-to-be-popular ice cream parlor and, before it was sold in bottles, an elaborate marble soda fountain. (I can easily imagine Kern polishing his brass door handles of a morning, proud as can be of his fine establishment.) And all of this was years before electrical refrigeration became a thing. I’ve never tried it, but I imagine keeping ice cold would be a challenge.
Back then, across Union Avenue from Kern’s stood the Second Presbyterian Church where Urban Outfitters is in the Arnstein building today. You can see it in on the left in the Smiley photograph above. The church, with its low picket fence along Market Street, gave the southern end of the square a different feel than today. Someone who wrote about it in the 1880s was Anne Armstrong in her “fragment of an autobiography.” Of Time and Knoxville (UT Press, 2022; edited by Linda Behrend).
“Papa and I walked slowly along Prince Street (now Market) at the side of the churchyard, which, like the church itself, by the English ivy which covered much of the ground, by the deep green carpet of periwinkle spread here and there, by the neglected but blooming roses and the tangles of honeysuckle blooming too, now in September for the second time, and whose heavy sweet perfume, with its sensuous, faintly sour under-scent, we could catch as we leaned over the low stone wall, trying to make out inscriptions on the tombs nearest us, a scent, a mere whiff of which, to this day, wherever I am, can recreate for me instantly, disturbingly, as nothing else, the old Knoxville I knew in my youth.”
Around 1905, the church moved a few blocks down the way to where Lawson McGhee Library is today and the graves were dug up and moved elsewhere, some to New Gray Cemetery.
Of course, there were also saloons, dry goods stores, barber shops, as well as horse manure galore. Almost everything that can happen in a city has happened in Market Square. People walked or drove a horse and wagon here to sell their produce and their wares; others came to buy. Still others came to loiter and scrounge for what they couldn’t afford. Some came to pickpocket. Not quite a Dickensian scene, but maybe close enough, particularly during the dim decades of the gaslight era. Then again, Adolph Ochs, the future owner of the modern New York Times, worked on the eastern side of the square as a “Printer’s Devil,” at the Knoxville Chronicle. He was so scared of walking home on his past the gloomy First Presbyterian Church graveyard that he worked overtime frequently until an older employee could accompany him. How well-lit the square itself was at that time is difficult to tell. But it was likely almost always bustling with people during the day.
When City Hall was built on the north end (where the stage is today), officials installed a jail – or a “calaboose” as they called it –in the back where the chattier prisoners would sometime engage passersby through the bars in the windows. The fire station was there too, particularly noticeable when the fire bell rang in the tower announcing a fire somewhere, followed by the swift trundle of firemen’s boots and the snorting of horses as those early fire teams spang to life. Those same firemen would rally to save the eastern side of the 400 block of Gay Street in 1897, which became known as the Million-Dollar Fire. In this case, even being close by wasn’t enough to repel the raging blaze that took out almost an entire city block.
Later that year, a new, larger, Market Hall was erected, and it stood for a little more than 60 years. A few people still remember the smell of the fish and meat. Several notable authors, including James Agee and Cormac McCarthy have written about it. David Madden did too, in his book, Bijou (1974), which was cited at the time as a personal favorite of Stephen King. Although the town in his book is named “Cherokee,” it’s a fictionalized version of Knoxville. Madden describes the square through the lens of the book’s protagonist, teenager Lucius Hutchfield:
“Lucius enjoyed passing through the ancient, three-story, block-long, brick Market House, its arched ceiling looming over them, a line of rough little tables running down the spine of the building where country women sold butter, eggs, shelled walnuts, jams and honey. Permanent butcher and flower and fruit stalls and restaurants and lunch counters on each side. They walked along the sidewalk flanking the market House where produce and flower trucks, mostly canvas-covered Ford pickups of the ‘30s, were parked, backed up to the curbs, their overladen tailgates hanging heavy, the country folks standing by, ready to sack up some pole beans or okra. The police loved to park at each end of the market House, where the ornate fountains attached to the sooty brick walls were dry.”
An urban myth has it that the Market House Hall burned down, but it didn’t.
Demolition was already a likely prospect when there was a fire in 1959, started by a careless teenager, but it wasn’t enough damage to cause the permanent closure of the structure. Perhaps it served as a catalyst for its final end. A few months later, the City called time on the building and down it came anyway. The Market Square Mall era, with its concrete toadstools, was about to get underway. But that’s another story.
In the meantime, Market Square remains busy today, bustling with life as it always has; business owners trying to make a living, hopefully by satisfying contented customers moving throughout the square along with everyone who has ever been there before them. It’s a colorful place. I hope it always remains so.
Learn more about the history of Downtown Knoxville, including Market Square, on the Knoxville History Project website.