It’s interesting how the use of a certain spot on a street basically stays the same for decades, if not more than a century. The site of a courthouse typically indicates a long tenure, but how about hotels? Hyatt Place, the old Farragut Hotel, is the third hotel building connected with the northeast corner of Gay Street and Clinch Avenue, and the general site dates back to the time of one of downtown’s early grand homes.
That house, belonging to John Hervey Crozier (1812-1889), stood on this general spot. Built around 1853, it was set back about 100 feet from the road. “Road” might be a loose term. Back in those days it would have been more like a wide dirt track, constantly ripped up by horse’s hooves, wagon wheels, and the cleft feet of bovines and hogs brought into town by rural farmers eager to sell at auction. Often during the mid-late 1800s, animals were auctioned off across street from the Crozier house, outside of what we know today as the entrance to the East Tennessee History Center.
The Crozier family was already notable due to John’s father, also John Crozier (1769-1838), who for more than 30 years distinguished himself as Knoxville’s second postmaster. One of John Hervey Crozier’s daughters is especially well-known, the venerable woman’s right’s activist and suffrage leader Lizzie Crozier French (1851-1926). Among John H.’s passions was a love of books: he kept a particularly well-stocked library of 3,000 titles. When remembering her youth, Lizzie herself spoke of her fondness for her father’s library. Later, when she tried to inspire interest in her causes, she spoke from the back of a carriage to impromptu crowds at this very corner.
During the second half of the Civil War, when Union Army Gen. Ambrose Burnside rode into town in early September 1863, he chose to commandeer the Crozier home for his temporary military headquarters and commented on the quality of Crozier’s library. (As supporters of the Confederacy, the Croziers left the town sometime in 1863 before the Union occupation and returned after the conflict ended but didn’t return to this house.)
By the close of that war, few buildings of note stood on Gay Street north of where Clinch Avenue crossed, the intersection then, essentially, marking the northern edge of the town.
In 1873, officers with the Knoxville Post Office suddenly took over the house and set it up overnight to serve the public. This proved to be a stop-gap arrangement while construction continued on the marble-clad Custom House and Post Office that opened the following year, and still stands on Market Street and Clinch, the oldest part of the History Center. It remains one of Knoxville’s most impressive buildings.
In 1875, local merchant Col. J.C. Flanders leased the Crozier home, made some improvements, and turned it into a hotel, naming it the Central House. Flanders even claimed in advertisements that the setting and grounds could not be equaled. A reporter in the Press and Herald that year also described the place as “situated amid the ‘tall ancestral oaks’ which cast their umbrageous shade in front of the hotel.” (Umbrageous has a double-meaning, either to provide tree shade or causing offence, hence “taking umbrage.”) Flanders must have known what he was doing as the paper also claimed that “no better location exists in the city for a hotel.”
Those ancestral oaks would have been very familiar to Captain James White when he settled here in 1786 and who erected his cabin and a stockade known as White’s Fort, only 100 yards or so from where the Crozier home would be later built. Park a vehicle in the State Street Garage today and you’re basically parking on top of the old fort.
Little is known about the Central House except that in 1879, local businessman Frank McNulty acquired it and employed young architect Joseph Baumann, then in the early stages of a long and successful career, to design a new hotel that replaced a few short-lived brick houses on the corner of Gay and Clinch. Workers excavated a huge mound of soil to create a sizable basement, large enough, it was said, to fill the “Flag Pond,” the swampy section of town north of the train station. (The swamp was filled in by degrees from the 1850s through the early 1900s.)
McNulty named his new, three-storied, enterprise the Hattie House, which connected to the old Crozier home. Even before it was finished, the place claimed to be Knoxville’s largest hotel with guest rooms on the second and third floors above McNulty’s own dry goods store. He chose to name his new hotel after his daughter, Mrs. Hattie Ransom, although one story claims that it was named after the hotel’s cook.
The hotel took in guests in the summer of 1880, and a small barber shop opened on the ground floor, just a few yards down Clinch Avenue. Two Black barbers, Tom Prince (the “Black Prince” of Knoxville barbers) and Cal Parker, advertised themselves as “all sober barbers”— a sobering thought in of itself.
In late 1881, the Hattie House received one of its most distinguished guests, the notable abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass (1838-1895), here in town to talk about “Self-made Men”, likely to promote his autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass published a few months before. Douglass spoke at Staub’s Opera House just down the street, perhaps walking there, before he was introduced to the crowd by respected Black Knoxville attorney William F. Yardley, who told how Douglass escaped from slavery in the 1830s and how he “afterwards worked so zealously and so effectually for the emancipation of his fellow men.”
Frank McNulty began to remodel the hotel in 1893, adding another story, and re-branded it as the Imperial Hotel. The new banquet room was said to be a “marvel of beauty.” McNulty took pride in its styling, endowing the hotel with “oak and iron furnishings and marble decorations,” all locally sourced. Claying modeling, or molding, was completed by Eleanor Audigier, a respected Knoxville artist who led the local Nicholson Art League and Ossoli Circle. In addition to its saloon, catering to the needs of those who were looking for some more active entertainment, the Imperial also featured a billiard room and in the basement a bowling alley.
The Imperial also featured something new, a freight elevator (the first downtown building that featured a guest elevator proved to be the Vendome Apartment Building along Clinch Avenue when it opened in 1890.) The new convenience caused the hotel some problems in the summer of 1895—it almost decapitated one of its employees, a Miss Smith, after she poked her head into the elevator shaft to chat with a fellow worker between floors. A quick-witted bellboy saw the elevator descending and abruptly stopped the car. Still, the woman was seriously injured. Fully expected to die, she managed to overcome some atrocious wounds and survived. Just a week later, the guest elevator, ferrying bellboy William Boyd, plunged four stories to the basement after a cable snapped. Miraculously, Boyd was able to jump out of the elevator car to safety onto the first-floor landing. This wouldn’t be the last of elevator-related woes at the hotel.
In March 1916, about half an hour past midnight, flames were reported near the top of the elevator shaft. Fire Chief Sam Boyd was on hand leading efforts to evacuate the guests, numbering about 200, in all states of undress. It was estimated that a crowd of more than 10 times that number quickly assembled along Gay Street to watch the blaze that strengthened by the minute. Some said it was as intense as the Great Fire of 1897 that also began in the elevator shaft of the Hotel Knox and destroyed most of the buildings on the eastern side of the 400 block.
The fire, blamed at one point on defective wiring, reduced the Imperial to mostly rubble. A new hotel reemerged four years later, the Farragut Hotel. The new name honored the local naval hero Admiral David Gasglow Farragut (1801-1870), who was born near Concord, and during the Civil War Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864, uttered his famous directive, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” Knoxville’s revered professional artist Lloyd Branson painted a portrait of Farragut for the hotel lobby in his art studio just up the block. (That painting now hangs at the McClung Historical Collection.)
The Farragut hotel, recognized for decades as one of the city’s finest, became a gathering point for those of many interests. One of the new hotel’s developers was Ben Morton (1875-1952), a one-time Knoxville mayor who was also among the leaders of the local effort to create a national park in the Smoky Mountains. Perhaps at his suggestion, a couple of the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee members stayed here during a brief, but pivotal, stop in Knoxville during the summer of 1924 before taking off on guided jaunt to the mountains with Col. David Chapman and others. The six-day trip included a scramble up and down Mt. Le Conte, at a time when there were few obvious trails, after which the committee members recommended the Smokies to be worthy of national park status. Farragut Hotel bellboys also played a part in the park movement by donating pennies to the park cause.
Cellist and rare female conductor Bertha Walburn Clark formed and performed with her Little Symphony in the ballroom here during the 1920s, which led to the establishment of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra in 1935.
Football history was also made here in late 1932 when the Southern Conference athletic association met here and hashed out a new 13-member organization called the Southeastern Conference or SEC.
And let’s not forget, albeit a far cry from the days of the Crozier family, the inimitable James Brown staged his own radio station, WJBE, here in the hotel basement in the late 1960s. Brown played in Knoxville several times throughout his career, including at the Civic Coliseum, where in 1972 he was arrested after the show following an altercation with Knoxville police.
The late Bob Booker, the respected historian and Civil Rights activist (who actually lived at the Farragut for a time) happened to witness James Brown’s release at the Knoxville jail in 1972, when he was an assistant to Knoxville mayor Kyle Testerman.
By the mid-1970s, the hotel ceased to operate and instead became an office building for a couple of decades.
But it took developers a few years to plan the hotel’s resurrection. Developer Rick Dover finally re-opened the Farragut in 2018 as Hyatt Place. Stop by and take the elevator down to the basement to see an historical timeline, and then, if you fancy it, take a ride on up to the roof where there is a rooftop bar for a memorably lofty view, something that the likes of the Croziers and Frank McNulty could never see.
“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 about the city’s history and culture at Knoxville History Project.
