Knoxville has been celebrating the Fourth of July longer than any other holiday.
The first known celebration of Independence Day in Knoxville was on July 4, 1793, before Tennessee was even a state, and just 17 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Knoxville was then capital of the federally administered Southwestern Territory.
In charge was Commander William Rickard, a U.S. soldier who was in charge of the federal garrison at the blockhouse, located where the old courthouse is today. It was a lengthy event, starting with a parade of soldiers at 2:00, and a “federal salute” fired with cannons. The 2:00 time was significant, because that was the traditional time of the ratification. At 4:00, a Fourth of July banquet commenced.
At the banquet, leaders raised 15 toasts to honorees including Gov. William Blount, signer of the Constitution and governor of the Southwestern Territory; his superior, Secretary of War Henry Knox, for whom Knoxville was named; the Marquis de Lafayette, the popular French soldier who helped with the Revolution; Chief Piomingo and the Chickasaw Nation, who at the time were cooperating with the United States; and negotiators for Spain and the United States, who had just arranged to assure free navigation of the Mississippi River. A final toast hailed “the friends of freedom, who are this day assembled to celebrate the glorious epoch of our liberty.”
After that, Rickard’s men “fired a feu de joie which, from the darkness of the evening and the judicious manner in which the company was disposed, produced a pleasing effect; after which there was a display of fireworks, from an elegant colonnade in from of Mr. Rickard’s marque.” Feu de joie is French for “fire of joy” and refers to a continuous rifle salute in which successive shots create the illusion of a continuous sound.
It was probably the first holiday ever publicly celebrated in Knoxville. At the time, Thanksgiving was in its infancy as a tradition, not celebrated in most of the country. Christmas was considered an Old World holiday, rarely mentioned in the United States. America was a new place, and the Fourth of July was its own new holiday.
Knoxville was home to one signer of the U.S. Constitution, William Blount, who represented North Carolina at the constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Knoxville was never home to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. By the time Knoxville was founded in 1791, almost half the signers of the Declaration had already died. However, there’s evidence that George Walton, who did sign the Declaration in 1776, representing Georgia, visited Knoxville in 1798.
It’s not clear whether Knoxville celebrated the Fourth in such a public way every single year, but by the 1820s, celebrating the Fourth in Knoxville was a regular thing. In 1851, ironworker William Martin was killed during Fourth of July celebrations, when a cannon exploded downtown, near the what’s now Lincoln Memorial University’s law school. He was the first person buried in Old Gray Cemetery (then known, of course, as Gray Cemetery). He was buried there almost a year before the new cemetery was officially dedicated.
During the Civil War, the holiday was a quandary for the Confederacy. After major Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg coincided with the Fourth of July, 1863, it came to seem a Union holiday, and many Southern whites declined to celebrate the Fourth, even for decades after the war. However, Knoxville always celebrated the holiday each year, usually with a big parade.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Knoxvillians often took the trolleys to big special events at Chilhowee Park and Fountain City Park, to see baseball games and vaudeville acts, but also participate in picnics, bicycle races, and dances.
Since 1984, the city has held some version of its Festival on the Fourth, with fireworks and performances by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, on World’s Fair Park.
2 Comments
Jack, From what I’ve learned through designing the interiors of homes for the Christmas Holidays, the way colonists celebrated Christmas depended on “where” the individual lived within our 13 Original Colonies.
“For the settlers who arrived in Virginia in 1607, Christmas was an important holiday. While celebrations may have been limited, given the harsh realities of life in the struggling new Jamestown settlement, they preserved it as a sacred occasion and a day of rest. By the 1620s and ‘30s, Christmas was established as a benchmark in the legislative calendar of the Virginia colony, according to Nancy Egloff, Jamestown Settlement historian. Laws on the books in 1631, for example, stated that churches were to be built in areas that needed them before the “feast of the nativitie of our Saviour Christ.”
Interestingly, in Massachusetts, Christmas was viewed differently. “ By contrast, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony belonged to a Puritan sect known as Separatists. They treated their first Christmas in the New World as just one more working day. Governor William Bradford noted in his diary that the colonists began building the colony’s first house on December 25, 1620.”
These 2 colonies’ Religious Leaders held very different opinions, and unique viewpoints toward any type of Christmas celebration, and these opinions moved West, as the Appalachian mountain areas were explored and eventually settled. “Far from the child-focused occasion it is today, the Christmas season was packed with adult activities such as parties, feasts, hunts, balls and—of course—church services. People decorated homes and churches with evergreen plants such as holly, ivy, mountain laurel and mistletoe… In addition to mumming and wassailing, revelers in southern colonies, like Virginia, enjoyed caroling. They shared their joy in the Birth of Christ through services in church, and in caroling on the streets, singing popular English favorites such as “The First Noel,” “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen” and “The Holly and the Ivy.”
Continuing from The History Channel’s details, r.e. Christmas in The Colonies, “…though Christmas had become a relatively mainstream celebration by the mid-18th century…
( Christmas ) still wasn’t officially recognized as a holiday at the time of the Revolutionary War. In 1789, Congress went so far as to hold its first session on Christmas Day.”
These details came straight from The History Channel’s website. But, it’s quite interesting that in Virginia, the Most English of our 13 original Colonies, Christmas was always celebrated— beginning in 1607. Just wanted to add this extra info!
Hi Malinda. Very sorry for the very late response but we just saw your comments about this story. Here’s a response from Jack Neely:
That’s interesting, thanks for sending it. All sounds right to me, and you’re right that it varied with the region. However, there are some complications with that narrative that make it sound like a cultural lava lamp.
Christmas was roaring in England and its colonies in the early 1600s, when Jamestown was founded–but then it got knocked way back in the 1640s, with the Protestant Parliament, followed by Cromwell’s reign, when it was literally banned. By some accounts, Christmas didn’t fully re-emerge even in England until the 19th century, when works by American writer Washington Irving, who was fascinated with the ancient holiday and played a role in reviving it there through his history-based stories–and especially his friend Charles Dickens, more than 20 years later, who, with the creation of Scrooge, made it seem pretty awful not to take the day off. But that 19th-century version of Christmas had dropped or watered down several of the older English traditions.
I don’t know whether it was still being celebrated in Eastern Virginia by the time of the Rump Parliament of the 1640s, but I’ve found no evidence that it arrived in Tennessee before about 1820, with the popularization of Irving’s work. Ironically, the Northeast, where it had once been banned, was America’s wellspring of the new interest in the holiday, with Irving’s work and “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
There was still protestant resistance to Christmas here in the late 1840s, but by the time of the Civil War, helped along by immigration of Catholics and some Christmas-mad protestants from Ireland and Germany, it had become more universal.
JN