(Ed. Note: Today’s article is by Paul James, Director of Publishing and Development for the Knoxville History Project.)
It’s far too easy to take for granted the casual flick of a light switch. One hundred and fifty years ago in Knoxville it was rather different. During dark and often dreary nights, particularly during the post-Civil War years, local residents were just getting used to a new marvel: the gas lamp. These new flickering lights, erected on the busier street corners, began to shine some light onto a gloomy city.
I got to thinking about the gas lamp over Christmas week, courtesy of a scene in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). Ebenezer Scrooge, having finally closed his counting house late on Christmas Eve, and ate a meagre supper, walks along a darkened street to his house and sees Jacob Marley’s face appear in the doorknocker. The street and his stoop would have been likely lit by gas lamps. Later, when the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a wander through the streets of London, a lamplighter appears. Dickens writes, “The very lamplighter, who ran on before, dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamplighter that he had any company but Christmas.”
What would Knoxville have been like in those days during the mid-1800s before the invention of electric light? Pretty dark.
Dickens published that story just before Christmas in 1843, but it would take more than a decade before Knoxville got its first gas company.
Exclusive rights to illuminate the city was awarded to a pair of entrepreneurs, William Churchwell and William Swan in 1854—the same Swan who, along with Joseph Mabry, donated the land to the city for use as a market. It took the men two years to get the Knoxville Gas Light Company up and running. By 1860, the city, with a population of about 5,300, boasted 40 streetlamps and 128 private meters.
Then the serious business of the Civil War got in the way of progress, and the rugged city, occupied by Confederate and then Union troops for two years apiece, was plunged into relative darkness.
Technically, the company provided gas services until August 1863, just before Gen. Ambrose Burnside and his Union troops took over the town.
According to Heart of the Valley: A History of Knoxville, Tenn. (ETHS, 1976), “the property, which was pillaged of its metals by the federals, remained idle about three and half years…” Not until 1867 would management restart the company.
In the mid-19th century era of the gas lamp, the city’s Gas Committee (City aldermen appointed by the mayor, and perhaps others), prescribed the hours for lighting and extinguishing the lamps, employed official lamplighters. Using a nationally published almanac for guidance, the initial schedules were based on the prediction of moonlight: the rising and setting of the moon. Presumably, gas lamps weren’t lit at all on bright and cloudless nights.
For every lamp the lamp lighters lit, they had to climb a ladder to light the wick. At some point long poles were used. Early in the morning, long before dawn, they returned on their patrols to extinguish them.
Following lunar activity came to an end in 1870 when the Gas Committee instructed the lamplighter to follow the committee’s schedule, “whether the moon shall shine or not.”
By then, the gas works, located down by the river at Market Street, used coal to produce gas that was then distributed by pipes throughout the city. Author Frances Hodgson Burnett’s family lived near there and she claimed they could often smell the gas.
As Staub’s Opera House, one of the growing city’s early wonders, was undergoing construction in 1872, the Knoxville Gas Light Co. was helping to install gas lamps throughout the building and by the main entrance – just the thing to help welcome new patrons coming to see the opening play, William Tell.
But if the town was delighted with the new grand entertainment venue, it was particularly proud of its street lighting all around. The following year the Daily Press & Herald reported, “The lamps and post [at Staub’s] are decidedly ornamental, while the light they diffuse is equal to that from the gas lamps in other parts of the city. We think Knoxville can now claim to be the best lighted city in the southern states.”
But others shared in the new wonder: around the same time, gas lamps were placed in front of the African American churches just east of downtown.
In the early 1880s, the official lamplighter was one Thomas Lockett who proved to be creative on his rounds. After falling off his ladder one time, he rode a horse around and stood on the horse’s back to light his lamps. His trusty aid enabled him to complete his round and be back home in front of the fire for a few hours before returning to snuff them out around three in the morning.
Not being able to satisfy everyone, the lamplighter was questioned by one newspaper reader who asked, “Why in thunder don’t you keep the lamps lighted, these rainy nights, when there’s no moon and the streets are as dark as 40 black cats in the bottom of a well?”
Lockett was likely simply following the committee’s orders. Another time, he was accused of willfully ignoring one resident’s gas lamps, and also for being too slow on his rounds. He was charged with taking 35 minutes to light the lamps between “Barton’s and the Gay Street Bridge.” Barton’s was a dry goods and clothing store just north of the Lamar House, so barely two or three blocks from the river. Lockett claimed that he was under instruction by the committee to “take his time.” Still, dragging his heels didn’t improve his popularity. Within a few years, a team of eight lamplighters were employed, which was just as well as there were times when bands of “midnight marauders” were vandalizing the streetlamps.
If wandering around town in the dead of night might not be the safest way to earn a living, for one young operative it proved almost deadly. In 1893 a younger lamplighter, 14-year-old Wylie Evans, was slashed across the face by an unknown assailant while he was taking a nap in a shop doorway between his shifts in the Cripple Creek area, later known as the Bottom, where the new baseball stadium is going up.
Soon, the era of the downtown lamplighter was about to pass. Oil lamps were tried for a time but proved to be more expensive and burned less cleanly. A new method of illumination ultimately trumped it. The first electric lights were installed in 1885 and proved to be way more practical and satisfactory, even though gaslight service continued in some parts of town until the 1930s.
How wonderful it is today to walk around downtown at night and not have to worry about the moon’s schedule or wait for the lights to be manually lit in sequence.
Most fortunate today we are.