Through the Keyhole

Knoxville’s Extraordinary Marble World

For anyone who has spent much time in Knoxville, there is one thing that you might encounter in almost every part of the city, and that’s Tennessee marble. It graces several impressive buildings downtown and you can see where it was once extracted at Ijams Nature Center in South Knoxville. While the Ijams park still retains the original acreage where Harry and Alice Ijams developed their own farm into a semi-private bird sanctuary, its expanded grounds have, since the early 2000s, encompassed two reclaimed quarries creating an extraordinary landscape like nothing else anywhere.

In the latest episode of Knoxville Chronicles, a podcast produced by the Knoxville History Project that highlights some of the most interesting of the city’s old stories, “Through the Keyhole” takes a look back at Knoxville’s marble industry and features a conversation with Ben Nanny, the conservation director at Ijams, who has been directly involved in the cleanup and re-development of these remarkable places. When visiting the quarries, Ben says, “It really does feel you are going back in time. It’s a great piece of history, it’s a great story about what used to make a livelihood for Knoxvillians and particularly this South Knoxville community.“

The Marble City was a self-coined term for Knoxville from the late nineteenth century and still used well into the twentieth. Multiple downtown businesses used that name, like the Marble City Bank and the Marble City Saloon. After 1915 or so, even one neighborhood to the west along Sutherland Avenue became known as “Marble City,” and still makes that claim.

Construction on the Knoxville Custom House, now part of the East Tennessee History Center, using Tennessee marble, began in 1872.

Opened in the late 19th century, both Ross Marble and Mead’s quarries employed hundreds of workers, some handling steam-channeling machines that pried huge blocks of stone from the rock face. It was a dangerous place that operated 24 hours a day with daily blasting sirens, but, according to historian Dr. Susan Knowles, provided marble for two exemplary museum buildings: the J.P. Morgan Library in New York in 1906 and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1941.

Following the Great Depression, demand for marble slumped and Ross Marble and Mead’s Quarry transitioned to manufacture crushed limestone. The facilities limped along for several decades before finally closing. In subsequent years, Ross Marble became overgrown while Mead’s Quarry, particularly, became an unsavory dump. Eventually acquired by Knox County in 2001, Mead’s became a part of Ijams in 2001, when staff and volunteers began removing the almost endless piles of domestic and commercial debris that scarred the site. Ross Marble was added around 2008 through an acquisition facilitated by Legacy Parks Foundation, as part of its development of Knoxville’s Urban Wilderness, and opened in 2010 during Ijams’ 100th anniversary celebration. Thanks to Dr. Susan Knowles’ efforts, both quarries are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Mead’s Quarry has an imposing cliff face and a 20-acre lake, which occurred after quarrying operations dug deep enough to strike below the water table. These days, visitors flock there to swim or rent a paddle boat. It can also be a dramatic place. In the spring of 2024, a sudden rockslide caused a brief tsunami across the lake injuring several visitors. Online videos of the event quickly became a social media sensation.

Ross Marble is quite different – it’s a relatively dry ravine lined with imposing cliffs – and its most memorable feature isn’t natural at all, but a man-made wall of rough-shaped marble blocks with an entrance, eight feet tall, known as “The Keyhole.” On the other side, stone steps lead down into the ravine where you can look up and see “God’s Chair” – giant shelves of limestone akin to a Mayan ruin. These quarries definitely have a sense of place.

The keyhole, circa 2009, photographed by Bruce Cole.

Ben Nanny, who lives close to the quarries and has been involved in every step of their re-development, sums up what these quarries mean to him and the nature center: “The cool thing about the quarries is that they tell the different histories of the quarrying process from the cut marble that you’ll find in the Ross Marble sections, and the huge dimension stones that are lying all around. You get that feeling of the blasting that once occurred at Mead’s Quarry, which is indicative of the jagged walls that you can see across the lake. We can also interpret how rough we were on that space, how exploitive we were of these resources, and how its rebounding…both honoring the past and the future by reclaiming it. It’s so rewarding for Knoxville.”

“God’s Chair” at Ross Marble Quarry, photograph by Paul James, circa 2009.

Wherever you look you in these quarries, you can’t escape the fact that this part of South Knoxville was rather an unusual place for the Ijams family to develop a bird sanctuary. But this natural haven and its adjacent quarries have co-existed alongside each other for many years. Now together, they have in part helped redefine the character and feel of South Knoxville.

By Paul James and Jack Neely

This article appeared in West Knoxville Lifestyle magazine, November 2024.

Note: The history of the Ijams family, the nature center, and these quarries, is told in Ijams Nature Center by Paul James (Arcadia Publishing, 2010). Look for the title at Ijams, East Tennessee History Center, and Union Ave Books, and online at KnoxvilleHistoryProject.org