How Knoxville Became a Railroad Town

how knox 4 became a rail town where we're thrilled to welcome bob davis i've known bob for many years uh wonderful historian and tonight we're sponsored by charles jones he's actually our first sponsor so charles thank you we see you there thanks very much thank you paul glad to do it and charles is a board member with me on the the library society board at ut uh hodges library and he has a tremendous interest and has been following trains probably since he was allowed but uh certainly throughout the history when he lived here as a student uh in the 70s and i'm sure he's gonna have a few questions for you bob and jack tonight so uh thanks again charles and if anyone else wants to uh donate a hundred dollars and help us sponsor these if we got everyone done uh for 50 weeks that'd be five thousand dollars towards that budget to help research and promote the history and culture of knoxville okay chats i'm gonna hang it and i hope to you guys uh jack and bob thank you all right yeah thank you rayford for joining us and i'm i'm honored to have my old friend bob bob davis who's been helping me for quite a few years uh kind of behind the scenes with some of my favorite columns over the years back going back to metropolis days um bob is uh is an engineer by trade uh he's spent his whole career as working as an engineer and but he's also been a pilot uh he's a involved in training other pilots as well and it was uh through uh his his study in the history of aviation i think that i first got to talk to bob and i've never written about aviation and knoxville without checking with uh with bob first but i came to to learn that bob knows about a great many things and the things he doesn't know about he studies and until he knows them very well uh he's i think the ranking aviation historian and in knoxville he he is studied river boats uh in knoxville and has done quite a lot of work on on that kind of a little understood subject he uh got interested in bridges some years ago and i didn't realize how interesting bridges were until i talked to bob and and wrote a column or two about some interesting bridges in in town uh but uh nothing interesting more than railroads and uh bob has been incapable helped me on uh every time i write about railroads especially when i wrote the book about the old city uh bob was a big help with helping me understand kind of the confusing uh different dynamics of railroads uh and uh and making their way into uh into town and and out of town over the years uh and it people might question the title of our of our talk tonight uh how knoxville became a railroad town because a lot of people wouldn't think of knoxville as a railroad town that much because we are one of i think probably a minority of american cities today that have no access to regular passenger service at all through amtrak and in fact we've had no pasture service here for 50 years but there was a time when we had more than 120 pasture trains coming into town every day and you could catch them all day and all night that's why there were 24-hour restaurants in town because people might be arriving anytime anytime and also not schools once a lot of people don't realize this muscles once the headquarters for about 25 years was a headquarters of one of the major inland uh railroads in the united states uh back 130 years ago or so um but uh but i want to get a little background just to mention put in context how important railroads have been to knoxville i sometimes give my very short thumbnail histories of knoxville and i'd say your nusselt was really born twice it was born first in 1791 as an administrative capital uh when it became the capital of the southwestern territory and there was a capital tennessee and then it almost died it didn't have a lot of ways to get things in and out of town um we had uh we we uh we we had people arrived in those early days by horseback or on the flat boats and the river was a one-way uh one-way ticket more or less uh you couldn't go up river you could just only go down river and some people took that opportunity and flowed all the way down to new orleans from here to sell liquor bait in east tennessee but uh but it was it was not that uh useful until 1828 when we finally got steam boats uh starting to come up the tennessee river but that proved to be very limited it's been on the river level where they could they could sail it all up up this part of the tennessee so it was something by 1828 we were kind of wishing that we had something like a few towns on the northeast and the northeast coast had and that was the new invention called the railroad and it took a long time to get here and we had there were big efforts a major effort that i think bob is going to mention in the 1830s that brought a lot of interesting investors in here to make knoxville a railroad town but it really was not until the 1850s that we finally got railroads here and you see that in every respect that knoxville just changed radically in the 1850s uh because we knew that we had lumber we knew that we had marble we knew we had coal we knew we had iron even all these things we had and we couldn't move around the country because we didn't have a way to move them we don't have a way to sell the marvel we didn't have we we built locally with marvel like uh ramsey house and he's not scouting one of the first buildings built a tennessee marble but we couldn't ship it to washington and new york until we got the railroads uh but this was the 1850s was when knoxville just almost tripled in size and it was all entirely because the railroad i think even the development of market square a lot of the things we take for granted about knoxville happen only because the railroad uh arrived and people knew that this was going to be a town uh on the move uh but uh without further ado from me i'm gonna yield the floor to uh to mr bob davis and uh and talk about some of the research he's been doing into uh into railroads in in knoxville bob do you want to talk about that uh that those early days in uh in in eight years yeah while paul's got this picture up did anybody come up is what this building was right behind this thing yeah we asked that question last week didn't we it was our puzzle and i don't think i know it's a hotel that's correct it was atkins house hotel it was built in 1867 right after the war and uh it later became a terminal passenger terminal for the east tennessee virginia and georgia railroad so uh the first trains that came to knoxville the engines looked exactly like this a 440 the american style they probably burned wood in 1850s and uh they came right in over the gay street viaduct there this happens to be we've got a picture later on this happens to be coming from louisville the first one that came into town came from loudoun tennessee and the reason it was the first one was because they would like to have done it earlier but they couldn't get the bridge built there that had been took quite a while to get across the tennessee and it was completed on march the 20th in 1855 the 1700 foot span and it was a patent trust deck structure but they didn't get into knoxville until june 22nd because they had some of the track between here and they're done but they didn't have it all done always money was raising a problem for for railroads to get their their target dates done and everything so uh let's uh go to the next slide there and we'll look at how the knoxville looked uh with the first building there it says depot that's the east tennessee and georgia depot built before the railroad tracks were put there and this actually is just before the east tennessee and virginia railroad was put in because i see they got a track drawn up to the northeast there and initially during the civil war all railroads were local railroads so you got off of one railroad took your luggage and walked to the next terminal and got on the next railroad so uh to orient everybody that that map is uh that that street running up the middle uh perpendicularly curving a little bit is is gay street is that uh so that the depot is just uh barely to the west of where the current uh southern uh railway depot is still standing is uh is just just to the barely to the to the right of that we've got the first street to the right and second creek wandering up to the left there yeah yeah and the big flag pond the big swamp more or less that was there for many many years is visible there's actually two ponds that people were worried about and especially with colorado and yellow fever they were wanting to get those things closed before we move on do you want to mention the 1836 uh before this uh the the big uh convention we had here you want to save that for later no actually that's probably right now is about the right time uh knoxville was known because it was on the national road that was supposed to run from washington city it's where they call it washington to new orleans so that was a road in 1826. so in getting everybody wanted to come to knoxville because it was the west and so they called this gathering of some 377 delegates showed up in knoxville on july the 4th 1836 they came from ohio indiana north carolina south carolina alabama georgia and of course a good crowd from tennessee and they figured out how they wanted to act as a concert to make things happen because of the people in cincinnati wanted to get access to the atlantic ocean without having to go through the high prices of well anybody when you go to new york still costs extra money to do anything in new york so that was the big push and so uh they covered quite a few topics and met for several days so quite a few people came but what happened to that it was it nothing happened right away here did it no not really because the hawasi railroad had been started shortly uh around that time and it had went broke just built in the hiawassee bridge it was supposed to go to athens and then the east tennessee georgia took over in eight in the 1840s and there was a little bit of railroad work done up out of morristown basically from mossy creek to a place called wolf creek out of a one of the three c railroads it was called the cincinnati cumberland gap in charleston railroad but of course they didn't have the money to get through the mountains that well and so it was just a 40 mile railroad but in it was not even done until 1869 so there was a lot of little spurts going on but not really we were talking about this 1836 though this this is the biggest thing that had ever happened in knoxville at least since the capital years anyway with all these delegates coming here and bob and i were wondering where they all stayed we only had a couple of hotels here not enough for 377 people uh and i understand henry clay had delegates there it was all it was it was a major event it was not on the 4th of july in 1836 that was the that was the date of the conference and that turned out to be a major date in the history of railroads later on and in knoxville as well so but anyways it was kind of a in a way a kind of a false start it may have led to thing other things other connections but not not here in knoxville and i'm interested in the fact that atlanta which was created by the railroad was uh the railroad that founded atlanta was was was founded just a few months after this big event in knoxville and i can't help but think that people met each other and said hey we ought to just do this by ourselves out of georgia and instead of waiting for this giant national consortium of people to get together and agree on something they were worried that you couldn't come across the mountains that was going to be terribly expensive so they were starting to go from savannah to atlanta yeah and then came the western and atlantic railroad that went on up to chattanooga anyway 19 years later we finally get to get a railroad coming into knoxville and it looked this is the earliest map we have of of uh of the railroad in in the downtown area yeah actually that's you there in the y where you would turn around that goes up for the uh knoxville and kentucky railroad at that time that went up towards clinton coal or coal creek and their their out hasn't changed uh in the last 165 years has it well they cut down a few curves and level the road a little bit repeatedly did that the fathers ended up dividing uh some of this swamp land down here uh into four uh areas for four railroads that they planned to come to knoxville we have on the left here the big open areas is north of the railroad tracks is east tennessee georgia east tennessee and georgia railroad with the depot down below the railroad tracks and then on the right here we've got the east tennessee and virginia railroad with the tracks and then over here for the far right we've got the kentucky the knoxville kentucky railroad and we've got the uh blue ridge railroad blue ridge ended up being the uh knoxville in charleston was headed in that direction and of course the kentucky railroad went up through planting coal creek yeah so this was actually redrawn in 1924 because the old one was wearing out there was a lot of planting done on by the knoxville fathers because this was pretty cheap land here i just noticed that uh named ingles down there at the bottom that was a well known uh mill uh ingles uh the english mill that was right on the uh right on the first creek there and so i think you see gay streets right in here uh on the lower left and it curves just a little bit and goes right between virginia and georgia river and this is day 1854 right before the train actually arrived this next one's going to show what actually developed this is probably a 1871 yes and so now we've got some infrastructure for the railroad here the most obvious thing railroad rises that roundhouse there you might point that out paul you know that's just to the north of gay street which runs across the middle of the diagonal and then just this side on the other on this side of the railroad tracks is the east tennessee and virginia depot and then down to the left is east tennessee and georgia depot as i say i guess we ought to back up and and the the first railroad to arrive in knoxville was the east tennessee in georgia and that was the one that arrived in the early summer of 1855 and uh it arrived twice it arrived once uh informally and was was hailed uh but but then they had a bigger event on the fourth of july they thought it'd be great for the railroad to arrive officially on the fourth of july and that was kind of the grand opening rather than the soft opening was the fourth of july 1855 and we had a railroad from north georgia coming into knoxville and that was the only one for about uh three years and then 1858 we had the east tennessee and virginia railroad which which uh took us all the way up to uh the east coast uh eventually and um and then the the two later combined what in 1869 bob is that right one yes east tennessee virginia and georgia railroad and this just got bigger and bigger it was uh connected virginia to georgia and and and other states uh along the way around the around the region and uh knoxville was the headquarters of it but this is uh this is what it looked like not long after the merger of the georgia and virginia lines but this is a great bird's eye view map from 1871 and we see uh gay street again kind of slanting street uh toward the bottom there yeah and uh in the roundhouse as you mentioned and uh doesn't go down far enough to show the kentuc knoxville kentucky railroad taking off to the north but this is when nasa was really starting to catch up it the civil war just knocked the wind out of knoxville for a while it had been growing so fast in 1850s the civil war hit and then it took a few years for knoxville to get get back on its feet and uh and this was really when it was really starting in earnest to be a an industrial railroad town with that people took seriously and had a lot going on just in almost you know ninety percent of it because of the railroad yeah that's the east tennessee in virginia at eastern georgia i'm sorry uh depot and that was built in 1852 before the tracks actually came into town and you got a little shops over here on the right we can see the virginia east tennessee virginia depot right here with the white columns in front of it with the gay street viaduct in front and uh samuel b cunningham was the driving force behind that and in may 14th 1858 they put the last spike in going for the railroad to get to virginia and of course then they had a later celebration of that and on may the 20th the first train went to virginia and to the to the virginia and tennessee railroad which ran from bristol on up to lynchburg and uh and bob that that building you're talking about was uh is the same place it's not the same building but the same place uh roughly this where the jackson terminal is today uh a very similar shaped uh long low building uh was was built a brick later on after after this and you might notice in the foreground there's a cow for one thing uh and also the uh remains of that swamp we were talking about the uh that's the one of the last remnants of the old flag pond that was largely filled in for the railroad project over the years and finally vanished all together in the early 20th century i guess you could call it a union uh moat to keep people out of nowhere yeah yeah yeah the union army in 1863 actually flooded a lot of this area deliberately just to make it hard uh hard for the confederates to uh to to attack that way and of course train traffic got going pretty well in 1859 because they finally finished the tunnel through missionary ridge and made the link from cleveland to chattanooga because one thing i didn't mention is east tennessee and georgia railroad went to dalton georgia went down to cleveland and then down to dalton georgia sort of like the highway does now and so uh you were funneled towards atlanta and obviously wanted to get to chattanooga you had to change it dalton and get another train and go up to chattanooga before they did that tunnel but then when the tunnel was done the whole route from new orleans to new york or new york to new orleans could be done fairly quickly i think it was some 50 some odd hours it took you to do it uh when they got their speeds up and so it's interesting that freight was what the railroads wanted to do local passengers commuters coming from morristown clinton maryville and all and then also the long-term passengers get to where they wanted to go the people that had the big money so this picture here moves on but we've got to take just a second to recognize it like jack said things slowed down during the civil war both before it was a lot of planning done in the 50s but then every people started saying i don't want to spend money if it's going to be blown up by the by military function so that slowed down and then there was a the worst flood that the tennessee river has ever seen happened in march of 1867 the carpet baggers and everybody that had come down here to start going industry and knoxville they started really constructing things and a lot of it around the river and the railroad tracks went right by the river and here comes this huge flood that whatever they had done since the war stopped about 1865 until march of 1867 was just wiped out spans of the knoxville and charleston bridge that were going to go to maryville were just wiped away and so after the civil war they started doing a bunch of things the bridge across the clinch river was completed in january of 1867 first train to clinton went there that was slightly before and that wasn't so bad because the biggest flooding was in the knoxville river and then in may of 1867 the k and o ended up with a depot which uh we'll see in one of the later pictures and the louden bridge was rebuilt in november 12 18 7. remember it was dynamited during the war and then the knoxville and charleston covered span bridge wood right here that's right where the iron pin iron pin and rod bridge that the norfolk southern occasionally uses uh was built and it had to be raised up to make sure it cleared for the steamboats for their high stacks and it was finally finished in march of 1868 and in august the first train went to maryville of 1868. you mentioned but i think most of what we see now was underwater during that flood of 1867 they said that downtown was an island for a while that so we're looking i think most of the area between here in sharps ridge that you see in the distance was was underwater at that time and it's interesting that during that uh uh before that back in 1850s they there was a proposal by mayor swann to build a canal connecting first and second creeks along the railroad and it would have been an interesting industrial development to have shipping along this canal connecting the creeks that would load uh connect with the trains and and uh and load back and forth but anyway back to you bob so uh they started building the second round house but uh we also need to talk about the main structure in this picture here it was this picture was taken in the 1880s but the main structure appeared in 1874 was this huge passenger shed that's just to the west of the gay street viaduct a little steeple with the the gay street end with a clock in it this was the first halfway decent passenger station that the railroad had that there was waiting rooms in there and the train would be covered so the passengers would be dry when the train came and it's got a vent at the very top that lets the smoke out and everything so that was uh good for a passenger station until the atkin house got modified to be the passenger station and that wasn't until 1889. so what happened before then well a bunch of things happened in 1889 but the key picture that we started with our show was the first train from louisville came on june the third 1883. now the thing about that was it was the lnn but they came over the knoxville and ohio railroad everything was expanding so rapidly in knoxville that the railroads couldn't meet the demand so they were just glad for anybody to come in the business that needed to be done and i forgot to also mention that the architect had an office here that built this 1874 good long building there and his name was ac bruce and he's also built a building that's over here at lmu now it's not a major building but it's it's there and so he had two jobs here in knoxville while he was here he's basically a wide architect i believe in that right jack yeah i'd like to look him up yeah and so and of course just for markers the first locally funded public use non-railroad bridge over tennessee at gay street opened in 1873 on october the 13th so people were starting to get around yeah didn't have any cars yet still had the horses and all and uh notice that the gay street viaduct here that's most commonly called across the railroad tracks starts at ground level and arches up over the railroad tracks and it goes back down and we'll see later on that they sort of ended up leveling that when they built later editions yesterday do we want to talk about 1889 yet uh well uh you're talking about the uh what the the worst train disaster in 19th century knoxville history i guess was in 1889 is that what you're thinking about or something else right yeah because uh the cumberland gap tunnel had been completed on august the 22nd and a week later they started that first passenger train up to powell valley to middlesbrough and uh it killed seven very notable people who were in the brand new car on the back yeah and it ended up uh injuring them i think only four or five of them died immediately a couple others died later on that was a big ceremonial yeah it was invitation only thing it was all it was all dignitaries they were the mayor and city council and judges and and and all sorts of of uh railroad dignitaries were there it was all because of this guy alexander arthur who who was who had i think was born in uh in scotland but he came here and created this industrial paradise up in middlesborough kentucky and and had he lived in knoxville at the time and and uh they were building this this train that went directly there and uh and all they were they were sure that this was going to be the you know the kind of the rebirth renaissance of industrial renaissance of of east tennessee that that they all wanted to be on this train and that train their the track and the trestle apparently wasn't quite ready for the for the load is that your understanding of involved that i've got a conclusion that i haven't looked at lately that came out several weeks or a month after the event but it was the fact that the car was too new and it wasn't very flexible and it didn't follow the curves quite well but it crashed into uh into a creek right the flat creek like some not much of a breeze i mean it's a it's a major creek but it's not like a river or anything yeah yeah have you been to that site bob yes i've been there and i've got some aerial pictures of it too huh yeah we could fill the hand later on another reboot or whatever but that'd be interesting to see that but also coming up in 1889 is uh a new depot which we don't have any pictures of was called the main street depot and people were plugging a lot of money into railroads out of knoxville another one was the knoxville souther and its goal was to have a standard gauge that went from knoxville all the way down to marietta or atlanta uh because that did not exist at the time uh people wanted to get to the lineup quicker and we could spend a good bit of time talking about the atlanta knoxville and northern and the myriad and north georgia railroads and all their efforts to build a bridge and uh there had needs there were swaps where you could use the other men's bridge to get your trains across the tennessee here but then the southern raised their price and so the marriott in north georgia got mad rented a steamboat and a couple of barges and put the dog on trains on a barge and floated them across from where the scottish pike is now across to where the sewage plant is to get them on their way north yeah yeah yeah that atlanta connection is atlanta was a city that was entirely invented by the railroad basically it didn't even even uh it didn't exist for nozzles fifty years nostalgia russell was 50 years old before atlanta had you know began growing and it could grow entirely because of the railroad and because there was no river access to atlanta atlanta that's right that was a good that was okay thing for a railroad because i don't have to build bridges across it so um but that uh yeah but atlanta became something invented entirely by the railroad so atlanta became the city to to beat to try to be like and um that was uh it's interesting to think that knoxville and atlanta were kind of rivals back around 1850 but atlanta had the advantage because it had better already had better over road connections at that time try that next picture there paul i think it will show the front end of the uh that 1874 depot yeah yeah there we are there's that full four locomotive that burns the wood gay street viaduct and that 1874 passenger depot it's got those arches also showing up in there is the headquarters of the east tennessee virginia georgia railroad over here on the left it was a four-story building there yeah that was still there until the the 1970s right bob that one went before the one on the other side because there were two of these two big four-story buildings they were first built as a three-story building the other one that picture was taken in about 1880 or sketch was made in about 1885. yeah but we didn't have any big locomotives coming into town yet okay that says the division headquarters of the southern railway it was the whole headquarters of east tennessee virginia and georgia when they built it and then this is where southern headquarters were for a very short while because as soon as southern was formed they moved to washington and so it became the division headquarters yeah yeah when jp morgan in new york is the guy that created southern railway and he uh he he did it by combining a couple of big railroads including knoxville's own east tennessee virginia and georgia railroad uh and uh and knoxville they talked about nasal being the headquarters of southern for a while but uh but like you say it was a very a very short time but uh but the whole uh but it was very important to southern railway because it had the koster's chop which was actually named for an associate of jp morgans up in new york who who died uh untimely around this this time but the costa shop was where they did all their repairs for all of the southern railway cars and engines uh for many many years for a century or so i guess we're i'm sorry we're getting this short on time here but uh the first shops were in downtown knoxville and with all the industry and all the railroads all those locomotives there was a lot of smoke and so eventually in 1894 uh the uh east tennessee virginia and georgia had already started to put their shops out there and the southern opened this up in 1894 and they were called the lonsdale yards the in the onsdale shop and it was about early in 1900 1923 that koster put a lot of money into the southern and so he got that yard named yeah this shows that tall four-story building there and it still shows the uh east tennessee and virginia building it shows the 1895 1874 passenger station and see all the shops were downtown there in 1886. yeah the old acting house is still there at that time uh on the is to the left of the house there paul yeah the atkins house is still there it's that tall story just to the left of the gay street extension how big the virginia and georgia had control of all the way down to new orleans yeah and you see knoxville this was the headquarters of this big line that they covered uh the south and up to cincinnati and they took the richmond and danville and made their further northern efforts when it became the southern union yeah and here's a blog showing all this is nothing but uh east tennessee virginia and georgia georgia and virginia that had control of the lines it doesn't show any of the allen end stuff or anything other railroads a lot of stations on there they stopped at a lot of places a lot of stops so now here here's the the building that was the passenger station just before the current one that still stands this was built and opened on january 1st 1889 they remodeled the atkins house hotel put their engineering offices in it all of our offices in it as well as the passenger station and the tall portion back there like looks like it's a little taller one two three four stories there and then it has a passenger shed here in the front so uh and they lengthened that passenger shed over the years as the trains got busier and busier so this was opened in 1889 in january and then shortly thereafter they opened up the huge freight terminal that is still standing here this is the interior of it and it was apprised as the best uh station that there ever was you got you got a fireplace and you got benches and in the gentleman's waiting room and there was a ladies waiting room and then there was a colored waiting room and uh you can see the type of script that they used in their promotions how they uh used a mixture of cursive and printing or whatever yeah and then it's interesting here see the et v and g uh on the side of the box car there this is a much later photo this is the marble from the john m ross quarry so what would have been near iams in south knoxville you can you can still see parts of the scene from the gay street viaduct today because you see the uh the white lily building in the background there and a lot of the backs of these jackson avenue buildings are still there and we can see this uh late in 1889 september 1889 the freight shed that's over here on the far right the far upper right corner that low building there is the yeah somebody asked about the sketches there are names to those maps and i just don't have to have them right in front of me yeah this is the building that was first built as three stores and they put the ymca in it because the southern really got into trying to keep their employees when they were not at home away from the beer and taverns so they started a ymca and really promoted they had preachers come out and preach and do all this sort of stuff but here's this 400 foot long called the jackson terminal today and this building in the front here is only 50 foot square now obviously it's made of stone marble and it probably is really 60 by 60 by the time you get all the walls built up but it was torn down in the 1970s in fact i even think the uh here the story the old smoky railway museum was offered that building and they didn't have anything really to do with it museums are have some size to them but they weren't that big at that time so yeah yeah and this is an interesting of all the logos that the railroads used and uh should have gotten one for the east tennessee virginia and georgia they had a real nice logo maybe next time paul uh but the uh knoxville and augusta uh had this type of symbol and uh they actually uh for the well-to-do people ran out to altmont you know and had the uh mont vale and allegheny springs uh every weekend for people in the summer time to try to get away from the heat because before the days of air conditioning yeah so that was 1896 there but uh so we'll jump forward bill was later a ymca camp that i attended as a kid they still had the steps of the old hotel there uh in the middle of the camp it burned that's to help mom still there too right yeah there's even a bridge in elk month that the railroad came across if you look for it yeah and of course this is the still existing terminal here nobody's sure exactly what it's going to be uh and yeah the marvel station is still there uh and we've got pictures of that for other things but notice they call that a pedestrian viaduct that goes from depot street into the main building there and then most passenger stations had these awnings around the side these permanent awnings around the side so people could walk around and as they did some mods to try to handle more and more people because this building was built uh in 19 it opened in 1903 but it was an 1896 size knoxville building and knoxville had grown so rapidly that they had to change a lot of things so they ended up putting all the commuters outside the commuters never got inside the building but if you were going a long ways as a passenger with your freight to go to europe or whatever you first had to go through this place here to get on the rails to get to wherever you caught your boat in savannah or new york or pittsburgh or philadelphia or wherever boston or wherever you had to use the facilities inside and of course the train wasn't always running on schedule and i got my hat on here i'll take it off now but you can see the symbol on the hat here is a symbol that's on the top of that southern station yeah that was the symbol that they used in their promotion in sales yeah well that was kind of an unusual style it was designed by frank pierce milburn built in 1903. it you might not recognize the clock tower it uh it was there for about 40 40 some odd years and was finally taken off after uh after world war ii they decided it was structurally unsound uh but that clock was uh important it was a big you know you read that clock from uh from quite a long ways around um but one other thing about this this uh this station that makes it interesting is that this was not too long after the separate medical decision by the u.s supreme court about racial accommodations and uh they were very careful building this uh train station that they had they they interpreted equal equally equal absolutely literally they they divided the station into two sides and one side was white and one side was black uh and uh and it's interesting that there was a a woman who was kind of the station matron who was there for many years uh her name was uh was maggie uh latimer uh very well remembered lady who uh was was known for helping people find lost children lost luggage uh they're helping them catch their trains but they say she was the first one you would see she had a black woman they would walk in and see her and she would she would take care of you uh regardless of your race uh and uh was much admired was still there it from the from the very beginning of the station into the 1930s and maybe 40s uh they she was much admired and much uh honored by southern railway and uh and and uh in the in the late 1940s they gave her a special award when she was 90 years old or so she was it's been her her life uh taking care of people in this station but quite a lot of stories about this having to do with the early earliest uh country music country musicians charlie oaks the guy who's some people think is the first professional country musician was a busker who uh played country songs about the new market train wreck which was uh in uh in 1904 i don't know if you want to talk about that bob but that was a new market train wreck was not only a the worst uh translation disaster in east tennessee history to this day um we've had even we haven't had any airliner crash crashes worse than this uh with this uh we don't know exactly how many people died on the on the it was around 69 people the initial uh newspapers thought there were 100 people killed because these trains were both at pretty good speed one was a commuter and one was a long-range train and somebody forgot to throw the switch for the commuter to get off on the side and they ran into each other yeah they ran right into each other so notice how those 30 engines are pretty well torn up there one of these trains that just left the southern station we just saw and the other one was on its way there and so that was a it was a personal thing for knoxville because a lot of people who were killed and injured were not civilians and they you know a lot of people a lot of them are buried in old great cemetery and all the injured of course were brought to uh the knoxville uh general hospital which was just barely opened up at that time yeah and the others were they stole them at this station or whatever because the hospital couldn't handle everything that's true yeah in fact the hospital had gotten some complaints uh from from people are conservative minded about spending money they thought they built too big a hospital and almost immediately they built it it was already completely full victims of the train wreck these are rare pictures are these uh paul are these jim thompson pictures do you think uh we don't know uh he's not named that he took them but we know that that was um in addition to that you know the million dollar fire in 1897 this was kind of his second major gig that he covered but even the clone collection does not have any new market train i got trail on here by mistake apologies for that but um yeah we'd love to find some of jim thompson's but could be his we don't know yeah i've got some other pictures that were not done by a real professional uh that i'll try to get to you okay still we don't have the uh new hotel atkin built yet yeah by the way the advantage is uh all three of us paul and bob and i are all in the uh old carpenters union hall tonight uh in different rooms uh and we're it's on top of old gallows hill and this picture was taken as a stone's throw literally from where where we are where we're sitting tonight but looking down uh over to the north of uh of of near the catholic church uh there and see the the southern station and the in the old station headquarters buildings uh in the foreground that were both torn down in the 1970s with some answered roofs on them yeah right two big buildings for the railroad yeah those those buildings architects say they're unusual they're the only second empire style buildings that that uh people have ever noticed built in knoxville and it's a shame that we lost them i haven't found out who's built the closest one here yet i'll hopefully come across that in a few another six months or so if i'm lucky and now you've got the hotel atkins holds 200 people there yeah 200 that's one of the biggest biggest hotel in knoxville at the time was the hotel atkin and uh that was where uh president william howard taft gave a big speech there in 1911. uh entering there is actually a tunnel that runs under depot from the southern station right about where that passenger viaduct is to that hotel atkins so you could stay dry that was discovered that was discovered when they were building the the current condos and everything and we need to really point out that the little tiny small building here is the enlargement that was finished in 1907. and everything that the southern did all the passenger service and the passenger trains needed more than just people uh they had to have refrigerator cars that needed icing up with blocks of ice and everything and they actually did that for passenger cars before there was a air conditioning all of the passenger stuff was done on the north side of the tracks all the freight stuff was on this side of the tracks so the little building was what the southern express wanted because southern express took care of your payroll the railroad payroll any large expensive things that you wanted if you wanted to send a turkey to your relatives from here from here to your relatives in boston you sent it by the southern express and they sort of guaranteed it there otherwise you know the only thing that you went with whatever you took when you went on a long trip so that's something ended up being a lunchroom the southern express and the dining room that was originally in the big all that was originally in the big building yeah we should point out when they built the big building in 1903 the day they opened it uh people came in and complained it wasn't nearly big enough that they had they had underestimated the uh the the need the need for space in that building well knoxville's growth was just so rapid it was just astounding yeah and by the way the yakkin was just one of about four good sized hotels it was the biggest one over in that immediate area for people who were just getting off the train um and uh but that and there were lots of smaller you know tiny hotels up and down depot street so there were plenty of places to stay here right along depot it's a it's just it's like a whole different city of people who are coming and going by the by the train up at that northern end of gay street and the only thing left is the the lower part of the hotel watauga is now the uh alliance for a better nonprofit's building brown building the old the rodriguez building yeah uh an interesting thing is that that 1904 collision occurred because there was not double tracking to morristown like eventually there was because the double track came in in 1907 and then railroad volume has diminished and so now it's still just a lot of the ways between here in marstown it's still just one track it's back to one track this shows us sort of a two uh uh parts to the viaduct here and then here's the commodore concrete viaduct that came along later and this access road is still here that you get in to go to the southern depot and all the trucks that railway express trucks were headquartered there later on they came out and a lot of the extra cars that were needed when you had a special excursion or a big crowd of people were stored over here on the right in the y and so they could throw in their extra cars when they needed them you also see the big smoke stack for the enlarged bowler that the white lily flower had that's sticking up down there just beyond the southern station clock tower yeah by the way bob though when a lot of famous people would come to town everybody from buffalo bill to tallulah bankhead would come here and instead of getting a hotel in knoxville they would stay in their pullman car down and parked right along there about where probably where those pasture cars or perhaps but but they would do interviews in those cars and uh and people would reporters would come in and talk to them and and they were very sumptuously decorated uh but it's uh it's uh it's interesting to think of all the famous people like king paul of greece was was in that station and uh and uh uh what carrie nation that the the temperance of terrorists and lots of other lots of other folks came through there over the years elvis presley but it's interesting to look at the bridge and notice where the smokestacks from the steam from the steam engines have stained the bridge yes and of course later on they had more streamlined passenger cars like you'll see that we've got one down at the old smoky railroad museum that didn't have the player story or the step roof there all right this goes to show how much the place was used at certain times yeah this is i guess it's from 1917 from world war one off to training camp or is this uh or is this later i i there probably is 1917. it is you may not be able to see it's on the right yeah dramatic day people saying bye to their friends and loved ones some of them for the last time emotional spot in town i'd say other than maybe a church for a wedding yeah there are 200 of those guys that didn't come back from world war one yeah and somebody said there's not a man without a hat of course not or a woman that was one of the things we were talking about earlier today is this in the last 10 20 years it's been a bit of a ghost town area downtown knoxville but uh think how it was a hundred years ago plus yeah events i went to a big beer festival down there there there are some things that bring people down there in large numbers so it was used for passenger service all the way up into 1970 that was the last 1970s that's right the last train that came through and it was i only had a car or two yeah i guess they're coming home now yeah this is the william jennings bryan funeral car yeah this 19 summer 1925 remember the scopes monkey trial william james bryan just gave it everything he had and uh and and was was pretty stressed stressed by the experience and died days after the days after the trial and uh down in dayton and his funeral car of course came through through knoxville and was greeted by lots and lots and lots of fans of course he'd been a presidential contender and a democratic nominee for the presidency several times was a charismatic leader was a also a pacifist he'd been secretary of state during wilson's administration so people had a lot of reasons a lot of connections to william james bryant and uh been a populist uh uh uh leader since the 1890s so when he died it was a big deal by the way you mentioned eltmont he was it actually was actually on his way to uh who was planning to come to elk mott uh after the uh after the case uh and uh as as uh did other lawyers but including clarence darrow did go to elmont uh but didn't make it uh lelmont was a new place and they were gonna relax there after the trial and uh never never got to happen for for brian and here's the circus uh parade coming across the gay street viaduct and uh yeah probably 1930 or so i'm guessing by the cars and you can see all the little buildings down there uh uh behind the hotel act in there and this is a more uh powerful engine that a lot of these trains from knoxville went over to uh saluda mountain and they had these huge engines that were they were [Music] compound and matrix too they had a couple of cylinders here where they used steam twice and then they had a two sets of drivers that's probably a a two four four two or something engine there and he's got all his freight lined up and uh yeah how many cars could that pull bob oh it would probably pull 30 or 40 or 50. it begins it depends on the the grade they got to go through and then of course they had trained locomotives stationed in the mountains to help push them up the mountain yeah they got on the rear and helped push it varied on just you know whether they were full or empty not quite as long as we have usually 100 car trains that come through here now all right this is the other station uh uh nostal's a railroad town not just because of the southern railway because of this one too you want to say something about it bob this sort of makes me say that it's it's really made knoxville a railroad city because the lnn had used tracks or divisions of southern's tracks to get in here in the 1880s but money came in and uh the lnn became a competitor they actually had meetings between samuel spencer and smith i think was his name president of lnn to say what territories they were going to fight on and what territories they weren't going to and one place they really fought on was to get to the tracks in south knoxville and of course southern ended up with a tunnel there and the lnn came down by the riverfront which is now under water now and uh just to the right of this building is the southern the ln freight station that was built first and then this built and ln's express purpose when they built this building was to make it fancier than the southern yeah they didn't use near as much local stuff either all this stone came from indiana somewhere up there that he came from it's built in 1905 just two years after the the southern station and it opened on january the first and it was uh a different type of way of serving the trains had to back in here and pull out whereas the southern was an on-the-line railroad that they just slow down and stop and then go on and and today this is the illinois stem academy the high school and i i can't think of a better use for it and it's it looks better inside it it's very well redone uh it probably looks better than it has since 1905 in there but the the real key for the lnn and and paul's got another slide here was of course they had to build their terminals freight and passenger they had to go through a bunch of mountains up north of here it was called the knoxville lafollette angelico railroad that built three tunnels and the problem was in the tunnels started collapsing so that none of those tunnels exist anymore because they just took more dirt away to where they had just a deep cut but they started out with three tunnels and that was a big effort engineering-wise because in the early 1900s steam shovels were just coming into effect so they used them here but prior to that tunnels were real slow build because it had to be done by manual labor yeah and then james he has some great descriptions of this station and uh it does in the family then a lot of people you'll you'll know that so this was his father's favorite to top up his father's favorite train station and it was closer to downtown than the southern was you know for business-wise purpose the closest station is one we don't have many pictures of because it was just a couple of houses that were modified it was at main street station for the knoxville and augusta with people that came from maryville and i actually found out just recently that the knoxville severeville and eastern used that mainstream station but now here's the video that i've got a lot of articles on this that the uh this is the first real use of concrete extensively in knoxville it was built by william j oliver a company who also built the knoxville cereal in eastern and it took quite a while to do it and they first wanted it to be started grade and arch over and go back down but people didn't like that so they finally ended up making it fairly level and they actually got the street car tracks to go over as you can see there and you can see uh some remnants of the sheds for the freight uh depot there to your left but the freight depot is really up to the right there we are this is built over the lnn tracks of course this was uh what was the world's fair uh many years later but the uh i think the peers of that bridge or that viaduct are still there is that right i think thank you yeah and the the the thing was that second creek really sort of divided knoxville from west knoxville and if people looked at the history of knoxville it was divided into first it was knoxville then it became uh north knoxville added on and then there was west knoxville and then there was east knoxville and the population of knoxville wasn't very big because people were just using the population of knoxville they didn't put those others in finally they got smart and finally added them all up and knoxville all of a sudden jumped up to be a huge size city in a very short length of time west knoxville is what we know is fort sanders now right yeah that was west dossier back then yeah yeah yeah west knoxville basically was bound in second creek the third creek and the river up to uh uh about where the cumberland gap and well back to where lonsdale and here then here's the old buildings jackson terminal but is what it's been named uh currently with the the multiple story building there was mainly for all the clerks that had to process all the paperwork to keep track of all that free yeah and then they they raised the roof up there and put the ymca in and interestingly enough the there's a huge sign on the far end there anybody know what ebco stands for eb uh coleman is that right copeland that's right copeland he was a big uh wholesaler in knoxville yeah yeah yeah yeah those two buildings were not there more than four or five years after that uh photograph was taken there was a two uh rare headquarters buildings uh lovely old buildings they've been subject to a lot a lot of art artwork yeah right okay yeah let's show them what's down there right now we've got six passenger train cars we'd like to say our scale is one to one plus three red cabooses and one came from norfolk western and it was a uh had the cupola on top of it and i've got a display in there that shows that not all cabooses were red actually and the existing passenger shed is still right there and then here's one of the streamlined cars and here's the other bay window southern caboose and the bulge is right here at where the picture was taken so that was another way to keep track of hot spots boxes and everything when the train was going when you didn't have a very high clearance going through a tunnel or whatever yeah and then this is a updated car that was actually used by the chesapeake in ohio and it is a coach uh divided in two but it was never a jim crow car at any means and uh you can uh you can't quite see the fancy woodwork and this is the inside of the mail car we just propped up a railway express agency's sign in there because it first started out as uh southern express and then world war one came along and it became railway express and then it became a southeastern express because really the southern doesn't serve all the south of the whole country it just serves the southeast and then of course it ended up being railway express and you can look at the names on these little tiny windows these little tiny male sorters there have actual stops on the route around here from here to uh chattanooga and you've got the mailboxes there yeah that's a great experience bob to see the that is that open does that have regular hours or is it by appointment it's my appointment now we haven't been doing much since the pandemic but somebody get a hold of me i'll be glad to take you through on the tour because it's you can't really do a tour of more than about six or eight people because it's all lined up walking down the aisles so you can't take 20 or 30 people at a time so it's still pretty good for things and it's an introduction of how things were in the beginning of the 1920s although our oldest car was built in 1915 which is the private car and uh it was it's all metal earlier private cars were wooden earlier private cars didn't have electricity they had gas you crumble those two together in a collision and what do you got you got ashes because they burn the steel ones are much more structurally sound for the uh the occupants and everything so yeah so we've got uh yeah what you got a couple other pictures there paul that's the last one we do have a couple of questions before we open it up there is a question a statement a pretty insightful statement by rosalind hackett saying it must have been a very different soundscape in downtown in those days was it much noisier and did the trains make similar sounds to what we hear today about that i can say this my dad worked at tva and he wore a white shirt and you had to be careful because it would come home stained with the soot from those steam engines and this was in [Music] it came in 19 late 1930s i can't think of the exact date actually what they do actually was uh so there was that problem and then of course all the other buildings took out smoke and yeah you could hear the the whistles and everything of course there's some people now that live in the condos get a little uptight when that freight train comes through at two a.m in the morning and he's got people traveling but to the sound engines sound very different today from what they did 100 years ago don't they because they had a they literally had a whistle uh that it had a high pitch to it like more like that it really you can try with compressed air but it still doesn't sound quite the same as the steam does yeah the uh it was interesting when the bbc was here doing a thing about aeg in the 90s they uh they said they had a library of sounds and uh and they were looking for uh american train sounds because they sound very different from european trains that that long low more or less and uh the uh they uh they they actually while they were here they were one of their quest was to get us out the sound of a train a freight train coming and going and they stood on top of the uh finally the last day they were here they kept trying and failing to do it the last day they were here they were at harold's deli they heard it coming and they ran down there with their and caught it coming and going and today i think at the bbc in london if you look up american train sound it'll be uh from knoxville that this out of a freight train in knoxville in the 90s it's interesting that you know the excursions have been going on forever and sometimes the railroad got really in a slam with too much business and on a few normally the passenger trains got the priority because those people talk back okay and the reefers went with it so they kept the food cold the florida oranges or whatever they were taking but every now and then things got so bad that they would shut down and let the freight get priority because there were just so many cars they ended up having blockades in knoxville on the railroad tracks because there wasn't any space to put any more cars but yet they kept coming in okay one more question and then we'll open it up um kathy celie asked about half an hour ago about the where was the creek where the big accident happened what was she what should we talk about then well flat creek is up towards a mascot there there's a uh there's also a right upstream of flat creek from where the railroad is is uh also a concrete viaduct there and everything where the road goes under the railroad tracks thank you bob jack thank you bob we really appreciate your uh you're doing this with us nobody knows more about transportation than bob is is there a question out there bob bobbitt lillian mashroom mm-hmm uh my great uncle a loyal sitton was a district uh superintendent or like that for southern railroad back in the 40s and 50s and i i remember going to dinner on his private car when he drove into um came down to knoxville uh one time he traveled he traveled the system and having dinner on that car and it had to have been in very early you know about 51 somewhere in that neighborhood but i keep looking trying to figure out how there was room for him and a secretary and a cook on that car you'll have to come of course everything's was smaller than it is now you have to see our private car because it's set up right now for an office a bed and also a place for maybe a porter or a housekeeper and a cook and it has a kitchen in it a kitchen and dining room and a secretary traveled with him so there were two bedrooms on the car um so it was pretty it was pretty big but um my grandfather was an engineer for southern and then my great-great-uncle george loyal was a vice president for southern and williams gibbs mcadoo sent him to washington to clean up the mess in the washington yards and when i was digging for information on him i found that in a sentinel back in the 30s that's nice that you can use the digitized sword and find that oh it is i wasn't expecting to find that well a lot of the stuff i've been looking at it comes basically before they are digitizing and some of the microfilming process wasn't all that good and some of the newspapers they had didn't come out very well so you got to sort of crane to read what it says right on the edge and everything but yeah it's interesting to go up there in the clone room and find out what uh what's available up there uh history-wise my the jack probably didn't really qualify it right i'm an engineer and uh and i'm also a pilot but i usually say i fly a desk or engineer a desk rather than a locomotive but do you know when the roundhouse up at john severe was built yeah that was in the 20s uh carl maybe can help charlie can help that out better when they built that sorting yard up there and everything which incidentally uh they've taken out the uh the switches for that right now they're still using that yard to store uh surplus freight cars or trains that are not even used like a whole bunch of empty hopper cars or empty uh motor carrier cars or whatever up there my father worked at the roundhouse as a machinist we'll see we've got a caboose that used to run daily between uh koster shop and the john severe yards and i talked to one of the retired employees and i said well what was all that flat space on either end of where you you sat and the car was going and it had a stove inside he said well that's where they stacked all the wood to keep the stove warm as it went one yard to the other i thought you're not you're not going to believe this but when my mother was moving moving out of our house her house um i had uh a bunch of guys i worked with at the university in the transportation center who are big railroadies and they were working on the railroad museum that they were going to build out at k25 so i told them to come get anything out of the basement that my father had acquired turns out that one of these little stoves sitting down there was a caboose stove had all the pieces and parts to it yeah that was a shame they got the grant for some money but they couldn't ever raise enough money to never raise enough money i mean they got a bunch of stuff out of our house i don't know where they've got it stored now uh the uh i lost train of thought there sorry hey bob hey bob where was the west knoxville station west knoxville station i think there was one i saw one map that said irwin on it and then there was another place a little further down i forget oh it was on that 1889 map that i was it aaron not irwin yeah i'm sorry yeah yeah aaron yeah bearden was the fir the only the first station i know of to the to the west of uh of of downtown yeah in fact it's often listed bearden uh ebenezer and concord they were each five miles apart bearden five miles ebenezer 10 miles concord 15 miles and those were the three stations on the southern line going going west you basically had to walk between those if you live right there you could if you if you if you missed the train you could walk you mentioned about having those components that's the main thing with our little museum here we don't have any inside space to store anything we try to display the cars as they were when they were in use so you can see uh what how things actually were and people get very we've got a sleeper there and people are not too comfortable walking down that narrow hallway because you know it was wasted space except when you were going somewhere it's only probably about 30 inches wide and even has a heater on one side and the floor there so space was really a luxury and if you're ever going to take an amtrak train you might want to at least come see what our cars look like because that's about the space you're going to get well we appreciate bob coming out and and uh coming coming here and talking to us here in uh in our our global headquarters at the carpenters union hall

Channel: Knoxville History Project

Views: 1,174

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Id: 6EBaW_LFapA

Length: 75min 43sec (4543 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020