Most towns and cities have statues and memorials of all kinds, but for me it’s the unique ones that not only inform the feel of a place, but also convey some local history. The most Knoxville-centric downtown statue is the Fallen Firefighter’s Memorial Monument that stands today outside the fire hall on Summit Hill Drive. The monument has an unusual past in that it has stood in at least four downtown locations since its unveiling 120 years ago, and still honors firemen who lost their lives battling Knoxville fires.
Let’s take a look into the history of the monument and see where it’s been.
The monument with its distinctive statue was erected in front of the Knox County Courthouse in July 1905 as a result of a fire on the east side of the 400 block of Gay Street, just the year before, that would claim the lives of two firemen and seriously damage multiple buildings.
The fire began at 9 o’clock in the evening on February 2, 1904, at 420 Gay Street, then known as the Phoenix Building. Operating there was Murphy-Robinson, a wholesale hat store.
The fire alarm would have been raised at the fire station close by in City Hall on the north end of MarketSquare (it would move later that year a couple of streets away to Commerce Avenue at State).
As fire fighters arrived on the scene, the fire began to rage out of control and spread to buildings on both sides. Before the night was through, a series of explosions tore through the windows and out the roof, sending thousands of straw and felt hats into the sky, “some ablaze, others only slightly scorched, the hats were both a fire and a riot menace.”
That night Capt. William F. Maxey of the Knoxville Fire Department, and his wife, Lora, had settled in for the evening, playing cards at a relative’s apartment on Market Square. A call came through to alert Maxey of the blaze. The couple had only been married for three months and Lora begged her husband not to go. Still, William felt duty bound to serve and he vowed to go and help, but he promised to be safe and be back home soon. It was not to be.
William, who had served the fire department as Captain of the West Knoxville fire department since 1901, was one of seven children born to Abram and Ellen Maxey who lived across the river. The Maxeys were prominent members of the South Knoxville community and came from a long line of cattle farmers and produce sellers in the market house.
Capt. Maxey arrived on the scene along with volunteer fireman John J. Dunn, formerly of the North Knoxville fire station, whom he knew and had fought fires with before. Dunn, whose family immigrated from Ireland, had recently moved to Chattanooga, but was visiting Knoxville family at the time. What ill-luck that proved to be.
The two men were sent into the building immediately south of the Phoenix building, but barely made a few steps forward before an adjoining wall of the Phoenix collapsed and fell on them. They were within three feet of the entrance. Immediate rescue was deemed to be too dangerous. The city fire department claimed that powerful backdrafts caused the building to explode.
This was the third horrendous fire on this block in recent years, the worst being the 1897 fire of Gay Street that practically destroyed the entire city block and more. The Phoenix Building then would have been relatively new, rebuilt soon after the 1897 fire and again as an even larger building after the 1904 fire. Some were still blaming the disasters on the curse of a white mule.
The legend goes that a white mule, part of a traveling gypsy circus here in the late 1860s that set up on the old baseball ground (behind and underneath where the Woodruff Building is today, near the corner of Gay and Union) died and subsequent bad luck had been blamed on the poor animal ever since. Indeed, it seems it was a superstitious thing back then to blame tragedies on the death of a hapless white mule. Just weeks before the 1904 blaze, one newspaper reporter had blamed the run of Gay Street fires on a “hoodoo curse.”
Perhaps the curse has gone away for good, but you can enjoy a pint of White Mule Ale at the Downtown Brewery on Gay Street and raise a glass to the dead very near the spot where Maxey, Dunn, and others met their maker.
The embers of the 1904 fire were still smoldering when a Knoxville Sentinel reporter called for the City Fire Department to be better equipped and also suggested a memorial fountain to be fabricated and dedicated to these two fallen souls: “Let a public fountain forever be a reminder of their brave deed,” the writer declared. (The Chattanooga fire department, which had helped Knoxville battle the 1897 fire, already had its own memorial fountain.)
The Knoxville Sentinel mounted a successful subscription campaign, and within 18 months, Knoxville had its own memorial fountain: atop of a marble base, engraved with the names of the two dead firefighters stood a rather startling metal statue of a firefighter carrying a small child.
Its designer was Guiseppe Moretti, who in 1897 had created the bronze statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt, erected at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He also sculpted the colossal 56-foot-tall statue of the Roman god Vulcan for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Mo., that now stands in Birmingham, Ala. It now stands prominently on a ridge visible from Highway 59.
At the public unveiling of the firefighter’s monument, on July 8, 1905, in front of hundreds of well-wishers, Knoxville Mayor William Gass accepted it on behalf of the city from the memorial committee. During the ceremony, the Hon. Joshua Caldwell (an attorney, writer, orator, and also the founder of the 1886 literary-based Irving Club that still exists) was asked to lead an address in which he claimed that not since the obelisk to John Sevier on the courthouse lawn had been installed in 1892 had the city erected a public memorial. But not just a memorial, it was actually the city’s first public statue.
An inscription on the base still reads, “In memory of firemen who made the supreme sacrifice answering their last alarm.” Other names of fallen fighters would be added over the years, including Sam B. Boyd who served as fire chief from 1900 to 1929 before answering his last call in the line of service—he died of a heart attack battling a raging fire at the Knoxville Business College on Church Avenue, close to First Presbyterian Church. Boyd is the only fire chief who has died in service.
An early 1900s postcard shows horses enjoying a drink from the two fountains incorporated into the base of the monument. It’s not clear if the fountains were ever meant for horses as well as people.
The statue stood on Main Street until 1914 when increased road traffic (by then cars would be rivaling horses) was cited as the reason for its move a mile north. It traveled north to Emory Park near the intersection of N. Central and Broadway by North Knoxville Fire Station #3. That station, long gone, stood in front of where Crafty Bastard is today.
Complete with its fountain bowls, the monument stood at Emory Park for about 30 years. In 1938, it would spark the imagination of Halloween pranksters who climbed up and placed a cardboard box on the statue’s head. The “trick” made a headline in the local newspaper, perhaps more for its lack of respect than anything else.
Five years later, a truck driver, possibly drunk, hit the monument and damaged the base, requiring a new one to be built by craftsmen at Candoro Marble in South Knoxville. The fountains, likely damaged, didn’t survive its next move: to a new spot on the lawn of City Hall, then situated on the campus of the old Tennessee School for the Deaf at Broadway and Western Avenue.
Here, about 1943, the monument gained a new feature: an illuminated lantern was added to the firefighter’s right hand. It seems that the new addition may have been directly inspired by Moretti’s original design as an existing drawing from 1905 shows the statue carrying one. Nevertheless, stand at City Hall it did for several more decades until 1977 when it moved yet again, this time on its shortest journey yet, directly across the street to become a fixture in front of the new downtown fire hall on Summit Hill. (The 1904 fire hall on Commerce, ironically itself seriously damaged by a fire in 1975, was torn down in 1977 after an unsuccessful effort to save it.)
In its new location on Summitt, the lantern was briefly still attached, but photographic evidence suggests that it was soon removed, perhaps because electrical power wasn’t immediately accessible.
In 2009, one Billy Woods with Creative Structures was doing some excavation work in Chilhowee Park when he dug up something curious: a marble slab with the names of fallen firefighters on it. He contacted DJ Corcoran with the City Fire Department who recognized it straight away. The slab was a long-missing part of the damaged base from back in 1943. How it ended up being dumped at Chilhowee is a bit of a mystery. And the statue isn’t talking. Corcoran, now retired, has an intimate connection with this story because he’s actually related to John J. Dunn. The fallen firefighter was the brother of DJ’s great-grandmother, Nell Dunn.
Will the statue go wandering again? Probably so, but in the meantime let’s tip our hats to our fallen firefighters, especially Maxey and Dunn, who lost their lives all those years ago.
“Ghost Walking” is my own take on life on the city’s streets in bygone times; how these streets and their buildings have changed through the years, and how through old pictures and stories we can glimpse the echoes of people’s past lives and particular events. If you’re looking for spooky ghost stories, please allow me to direct you to historian Laura Still’s book, A Haunted History of Knoxville, and her “Shadow Side” walking tours. Laura has been leading historic walking tours for years and she also generously donates a portion from most of her tours to the Knoxville History Project. Learn more here.
