Knoxville History Home Registry

The following are descriptions of homes of culturally, economically, or politically historic Knoxvillians. Not included are homes we know no longer exist. This is basically an inventory of Knoxville’s known stock of historic houses based not just on architecture or age but on their personal connections to significant people who lived in them. The intent is to inform city officials, preservationists, developers, realtors, and others of existing houses that have some historical significance that may not be obvious by typical criteria. Not considered comprehensive by any means, this is a work in progress, and open to reasonable additions, corrections, and amplifications.

For this first phase of research and assembly, this draft is alphabetized by name of the notable Knoxvillian, but in its final form it will likely be more useful organized by street address.

 

 

Roy Acuff (1903-1992) was a fiddler, bandleader, and publishing executive who transformed country music into a nationally popular phenomenon. He was born in Union County, but his family moved to Knoxville when he was about 15, living mostly in the Fountain City area, where his versatile father, Neill Acuff, worked as a Baptist preacher, as a sheriff’s deputy, and ultimately as an attorney. Roy attended Central High, and at that time the family lived on old College Avenue, a house almost certainly gone in the central part of the neighborhood. Later, the Acuffs moved just south of Sharps Ridge and lived at 231 Raleigh Ave. in 1930; that appears to be the modern address 1101 Raleigh Avenue. He lived in that house from about 1927 to 1937, a critical time in Acuff’s career when he gave up on professional sports, learned the fiddle, and started performing locally on both WNOX and WROL, putting together his first real band, the Crazy Tennesseans. Around 1937, he married Mildred and moved into another house nearby, at 226 Raleigh (now 1102 Raleigh), but didn’t live there long. In 1938, he moved to Nashville, to become perhaps the single most influential figure in creating that city’s reputation for country music. North Knoxville/Lincoln Park.

 

Paul Y. Anderson (1893-1938) was a tough-minded reporter known for taking on dangerous assignments, especially for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for which he served as Washington correspondent. He won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the complicated Teapot Dome scandal. He was born and raised in Knoxville, the son of a marble quarryman who was killed on the job. He attended Central High and began his reporting career here, writing for the old Journal & Tribune. His childhood home still stands at 4110 Sevierville Pike. South Knoxville/South Haven.

Also worth mention is his mother’s later home, 710 Phillips Ave. at the southwest corner of Claude, where Anderson often spent part of the summer in his later years, when he would return to Knoxville, golfing and speaking to local groups.

 

Drury Paine Armstrong (1799-1856) built the brick house known as Crescent Bend, at 2728 Kingston Pike, which dates to 1834. Armstrong was a merchant and farmer, and his house was the center of a plantation that employed enslaved labor. It served as a Confederate command center during the siege of Knoxville in 1863. Known for its terraced gardens down to the river, it has served as a house museum and event venue for most of the last 60 years. Near West Knoxville.

 

 

Robert Houston Armstrong, sone of Drury Armstrong, built his own house at 3148 Kingston Pike in 1857, which he named Bleak House, in honor of the then-recent Charles Dickens novel of that name. It was the longtime home of the Armstrong family, including artist Adelia Armstrong Lutz, who grew up in this house. For a time in 1863, it was used as a headquarters by Confederate General James Longstreet, and the house still bears scars of shelling, visible especially in its small Italianate tower. After the Armstrongs, the house had deteriorated before it was reborn as the Italian-style home of business investor John Scruggs Brown, a major investor in the Weston Fulton factory, and his wife, Carolyn P. Brown; they renamed the place Casa Modena. Soon after Brown’s death, his widow Carolyn P. Brown sold the house to Republican industrialist Roy Lotspeich (1882-1951) in 1936, the same year he bought the Knoxville Journal. He lived there with his family entertaining guests including former President Herbert Hoover and reformer Helen Keller. Several years after his death, his family sold it to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who in 1960 renamed it once again, Confederate Memorial Hall. It has been a museum and event venue since then. Near West Knoxville.

 

 

Chet Atkins (1924-2001), innovative and influential guitarist and music producer, was from Union County but lived in Knoxville during his youth, performing on the radio here in the 1940s. Like a lot of musicians, he’s elusive in the usual records, but in his memoirs he recalled living with singer-comedian Archie Campbell, in Island Home. Community historians have identified his home as a tiny house in the rear of another house at 2200 Island Home, alongside a service alley. South Knoxville/Island Home Park.

 

Charles Barber (1887-1962), architect and co-founder of Barber McMurry, was probably Knoxville’s most prolific architect of the 1915-1960 period. Born near Chicago, he  grew up in the Parkridge area (see George Barber), but lived downtown at 371 Locust early in his adulthood. He lived on Tazewell Pike in Beverly for many years (1913-1930s), but later lived at “Woodson” off Alcoa Highway, by 1940. The house eventually had a 2341 Alcoa Highway address, today that address is 2341 Quietside Lane. Although some of the interior is original to Barber’s time, the exterior has been radically remodeled and does not resemble Barber’s design.

 

George Barber (1854-1915; father of Charles) was probably the most nationally famous architect who ever lived in Knoxville. Originally from the Chicago area, he began designing Victorian houses in the elaborate Queen Anne style in the 1880s, making his plans available to a national clientele. He moved to Knoxville around 1888, and lived in Parkridge, the neighborhood he helped design and that remains the one place where his designs are most abundant: he’s most often connected to the house at 1635 Washington Ave., at the southwest corner of Monroe, where he lived for some years, but he’s also identified with 1715 Washington Avenue. After 1910, he lived in a smaller, more remote house at 1701 Glenwood Ave., where he died in February, 1915, just nine days after his wife.

 

West Barber, an architect associated with his cousins George and Charles, lived in a French eclectic house at 518 West Glenwood. By some accounts this house is also associated with the youth of Charles Barber.

 

The James and Ethel Beck home, now known as the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, is at 1927 Dandridge Ave. The house, built in 1912, was originally the home of a white family, James and Alice Cowan. In 1946, it became the home of Dr. E.F. Lennon, an African American physician who encountered resistance in the previously white neighborhood. In 1968 a leading African American couple, James and Ethel Beck, respectively a pioneering Black postal clerk and a former tennis champ who had helped establish an orphanage for Black children, moved in, but lived here only a short time before they died. In 1975, it became the Beck Center, the first community educational institution of its kind in the Knoxville area.

 

Robert Birdwell (d. 2016), a TVA staff artist who became one of the best known modern artists in Knoxville, partly by his membership in the Knoxville 7, lived with his wife, Rebecca, in a mid-century modern house at 4604 Lonas Road from about 1959 to 1976, encompassing his most productive era as an artist.

 

 

 

Lowell Blanchard (1910-1968) was a Chicago radio announcer who came to Knoxville in 1935 to work for WNOX, and start a new live-audience show called “Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round,” which helped launch the careers of Chet Atkins, Archie Campbell, Don Gibson, and many others. Also much involved in the community as a politician, he was elected to City Council twice. In his early years in Knoxville, Blanchard lived in offbeat Log Haven in South Knoxville, the specific cabin as yet unidentified. He later moved to 1910 Prospect Place, in near-East Knoxville (1948), and an unnumbered rural address on Crestwood Drive, near Holston Hills, in the early ‘50s. He and his wife, Sally, moved into a modest ranch house at 1416 (or 1414)  Coesta Dr. in Holston Hills, where he remained until his death at age 57. His wife, Sally, died later that year.

 

William Blount (1749-1800), a Revolutionary War veteran who became one of the signers of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, was appointed by George Washington to serve as territorial governor of the Southwestern Territory, the role that brought him to Knoxville, a town he named, in 1791. Blount was later president of the convention that created the state of Tennessee in 1796. Though chosen to be one of Tennessee’s first two U.S. senators, he left the Senate during his first year, facing charges of treason, due to the revelation of his plot to involve Great Britain in a war with Spain to obtain Spanish Louisiana as a British colony. Reputedly at the behest of his wife, Mary Grainger (1761-1802) he built the “mansion” at 200 West Hill Ave. early in his gubernatorial era, when it was  claimed to be the first frame house west of the Appalachian mountains. For a much longer period it belonged to the prominent Boyd family, including Samuel Becket Boyd, mayor of Knoxville in the 1840s, and his son, prominent surgeon John Mason Boyd (1833-1909) who spent his youth here. Later still, it was briefly the home of Mortimer Thompson and his family, including talented son Jim, the photographer. It has been a historic home operated as a museum since it was saved from demolition for a parking facility in 1925.

 

Robert Booker (1938-2024) was a civil-rights activist, politician, historian, and author. Originally from the Bottom section of downtown, Booker spent some time overseas with the Army and teaching in Chattanooga before returning to his hometown. In the late 1960a, he lived for a time in the residential Farragut Hotel on Gay Street. Around 1975, Booker moved into a small, simple house at 2621 Parkview Ave., where he lived for almost half a century, and where he lived when he wrote all his books.

 

 

Ralph Boston (1939-2023), a major Olympics track and field star of the 1960s who held three gold medals and the world record for the long jump. He was originally from Laurel, Miss., but developed a relationship with UT in the 1960s and lived at least part time at 3301 Woodbine Avenue in Parkridge from 1973 to 2010.

 

Lloyd Branson (1853-1925) was a Union County-born painter who by the 1870s was becoming known as Knoxville’s first professional artist. He seems to have been footloose for most of his career, without a regular residence, perhaps sleeping in his studio. But in his later years, he developed a part of North Knoxville and built a house at what’s now 1423 Branson Avenue. It was subject of a Knox Heritage effort to renovate it in 2015.

 

 

Harvey Broome (1902-1968) was an attorney and outdoorsman, supporter of the Smokies National Park movement, but significantly a leader of conservationism, author, and co-founder of the national Wilderness Society whose work culminated in the Wilderness Act of 1964. Broome lived at 3730 Broadway in 1943. There’s no house there today, but according to the story, Broome moved the rustic house to 5115 Mountain Crest Drive, where he lived for the rest of his life, and where it remains today.

 

Clarence Brown (1890-1987) was a popular and innovative Hollywood director for Universal and MGM, active between 1920 and 1950. Born in Massachusetts, he grew up in Knoxville, where his father was an executive at Brookside Mills. The Browns lived in several houses, mostly in the Old North area. The only one still standing is the last one where Brown lived (ca. 1908-1911) at 121 E. Scott Ave., when he lived when he graduated from UT at the age of 20, with two degrees in engineering.

 

 

Carlos Campbell (1892-1978) was a Chamber of Commerce executive who took a leading role in founding the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and wrote the best-known contemporary history of that effort, The Founding of a National Park, and was also a noted photographer of that effort. He lived for decades on Gibbs Drive, at the house originally listed as number 137 but now known as 2837 Gibbs.

 

 

Charles Cansler (1871-1953) was a schoolteacher, high-school principal, and author who became known as a leading cultural and intellectual leader of the Black community in the first half of the 20^th century. He lived very near Knoxville College. Cansler is listed at 1805 Lucky in 1930, but 1805 Brandau (same house) in 1943 and 1953. It’s believed that several visiting Black speakers, including Booker T. Washington, stayed with Cansler when they were in town.

 

 

Bertha Walburn Clark (1882-1972) was a violinist originally from Cincinnati who settled in Knoxville around 1904, working as a musician. She eventually founded the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, serving for several years as its first conductor, an extraordinary distinction in an era when female conductors in any nation were rare. Listed as Mrs. Harold Clark (her husband was a well-known musician and piano dealer), she lived at 708 N. Third for many years, from 1930 or earlier until about 1952. That house was torn down around 1965, probably for highway construction. Beginning in 1953 and until the end of her life, when she was still performing with the symphony, she and Harold Clark lived at 4212 (or 4216) Alta Vista Way in Sequoyah Hills.

 

Alfred and Jane Clauss were pioneering modernist architects. Originally from Munich, Alfred Clauss had worked closely with leading architects of Europe. Their first Knoxville residence, is at 3003 Wimpole as listed in 1936, and their house gained some notoriety at the time for its unusual modernist interior (no such address exists today; further research is needed to determine). They also lived at Loghaven, in a cabin unidentified, and of course at Little Switzerland, the extraordinary modernist development they created, now undergoing an ambitious renovation.

 

Mary Costa (b. 1930) was a significant star of opera who also did work for television and motion pictures, especially through her role as the singing voice for the title character in Disney’s 1959 film, Sleeping Beauty. She was later a key figure in founding the Knoxville Opera in 1974. Her parents, John and Hazel Costa, lived in the Aston Apartments, then and now at 2736 Magnolia, in 1930, about the time she was born. They later lived at 3018 East Fifth (1934) and 215 Fairmont Boulevard (by 1943, until about 1947). After her return to Knoxville late in the 20^th century, she settled in Sequoyah Hills.

 

John Cullum (b. 1930), an actor and singer who appeared in several major Broadway shows, including the original Camelot, won two Tony Awards. In the 1990s, he became familiar on prime-time television, as Hollis in “Northern Exposure,” and has performed speaking roles in several other television shows. He was born in Knoxville and grew up at 2144 Island Home Blvd., which may have previously been 130 Island Home Blvd. (1943).

 

 

Annie and Willis Davis were the duo who proposed the Great Smoky Mountains National Park project in 1923. In 1925, Annie Davis was elected the region’s first female state representative. Fort Sanders Manor, at Laurel and 17^th; they lived at 4144 Lyons View in 1930. (No such address exists today; further research is needed to identify their current house location.)

 

 

Delaney House. The house at 1935 Dandridge Ave. is the one remaining Knoxville house most associated with artists Beauford and Joseph Delaney. The brothers were born and raised in another, smaller house at 815 East Vine, that the local press in the late 1930s anticipated would be a “shrine” to the artists already nationally famous then, but it was apparently forgotten when it was demolished during Urban Renewal in the 1960s. Neither brother ever lived in the Dandridge house that became the home of their brother, barber Samuel Delaney, after losing the family home to Urban Renewal. However, both visited the house; Beauford Delaney (1901-1979), the more internationally famous of the two, stayed in this house during his last visit to his hometown, in the holiday season of 1969-1970. It was the longtime home of Samuel’s daughter, Ogust Delaney, who became a forceful champion of her artistic uncles’ legacy. It’s currently in the process of becoming a museum, in association with the Beck Center next door, to honor the Delaney legacy.

 

 

Joseph Delaney (1904-1991) lived at 916 22^nd Street for the last several years of his life (ca. 1985-1991), serving as an artist in residence at UT, and storing his brother’s famous paintings, some of which have since sold in the six figures. Although some report the house is still there, further investigation is needed to confirm that.

 

 

George Dempster (1887-1964) was an industrialist, city politician, and inventor, most famous for his introduction in 1937 of the Dempster Dumpster. During his long life he proved to be restless about residences, living in perhaps 20 different houses and apartments. He  first lived in a house not yet identified on Whittle Springs Road, for most of the period from 1916 to 1927, except for 1926, when he’s listed at 231 East Scott Ave., a house apparently still standing. He lived at Gibbs Road, or Drive, a large and well-known house facing on the corner of N. Broadway at 2805 Gibbs Road, from 1928 to 1932. He later lived at 315 15^th Street in Fort Sanders in 1934; that house appears to be still standing. But the following year, he was living at 1800 West Cumberland, a house no longer extant. In 1936, he’s listed as a resident of the Andrew Johnson Hotel on Gay Street, with mention of a “summer” residence at Lowes Ferry Pike, an unidentified house along modern-day Northshore. In 1937, he lived at 905 Mountcastle, a house in the UT area, now given over mostly to surface parking. From 1938 to 1942, he’s living at 1420 Rose Ave. (later Andy Holt Drive), a house no longer existing. His home of longest duration is an unidentified address on Maryville Pike, where he lived at least part time from 1939 to the late ‘50s, including the early part of his term as mayor of Knoxville. (In 1958, it’s listed at 1671 Old Maryville Pike; Heart of the Valley mentions that the “principal Dempster home was a 500-acre farm, Green Pastures, on Old Maryville Pike.) During that period he’s also listed occasionally with a secondary residence at 304 or 312 Springdale Avenue in North Knoxville, very near his Dumpster manufacturing company; it was perhaps just an apartment he used. In 1955-56, he has moved into Shelbourne Towers, near (but not yet within) UT’s campus, a stylishly modern apartment building where many affluent professionals without children were living then. (Shelbourne Towers was acquired by UT and demolished in 2014.) In 1957, he’s briefly listed as a resident of 505 22^nd Street. In 1958, he’s on “Old Maryville Pike.” In 1959, in his early 70s, he appears to be settling down in Sequoyah Hills, with his son, at 806 Scenic Drive (1959-61) and 2061 Cherokee Boulevard (1962-64).

 

Ernie Dickerman (1910-1998), a nationally known conservationist who became known as the “Grandfather of Eastern Wilderness,” lived in the YMCA at Locust and Clinch downtown for many years from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. His last local residence was apparently an apartment at 641 Scenic Drive, the same apartment house where the Everly Brothers’ family had recently lived.

 

John Duncan (1919-1988) was a prominent attorney, Knoxville mayor, and very long-termed U.S. Congressman, serving from 1965 to 1988. He was originally from Huntsville, in Scott County, Tenn. Beginning in the 1950s, he and his wife, Lois, lived for many years at 5403 Sunset Road in Holston Hills. His son John “Jimmy” Duncan, who also became a longtime congressman, grew up there, as did future state senator Becky Duncan Massey.

 

Elizabeth Dunlap has been claimed to be Knoxville’s first female architect. Although she did most of her work in landscape architecture, she built the unusual flat-roofed house at 1079 Scenic Drive based on a design displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. It has been called the first modernist house in Knoxville.

 

 

Don and Phil Everly became one of the most successful and influential duos in the early history of popular music. Although they lived in Knoxville less than three years, they began singing as a duo during that period, and also began playing rock ‘n ‘ roll, apparently on WROL radio. They reportedly lived in two or three different residences in Knoxville, though the family appears in City Directories only once, in 1956 at 641 Scenic Drive in Sequoyah Hills, during a period the substantial house was divided into three and then four apartments.  (It’s interesting that Ernie Dickerman, the nationally known conservationist, appears to have live in one of the apartments in 1957, perhaps just after the Everlys.)

 

Kermit “Buck” Ewing (1910-1976) was an art academic and painter who led a modernist artistic movement, much but not all of it based at UT, called the Knoxville 7. He and his artistic wife Mary lived in a country home on the south side of the river variously identified as on Beechwood or Topside, from 1948 until his sudden death in Bali in 1976. His widow Mary Ewing, who worked in fashion and design, lived for many years in the penthouse of the Pembroke, after its completion in 1982, and was known for her stylish parties.

 

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were neither from East Tennessee, but lived and worked in Knoxville off and on between 1948 and 1955. In 1950, they’re listed living  together with their wives in an unnumbered residence on Rutledge Pike. Perhaps further research can suggest which house it was.

 

Don Gibson (1928-2003) was an important performer and songwriter associated mostly with country music and country-pop. Originally from North Carolina, he moved to Knoxville around 1950, first living in a mobile home at an unnumbered address on Alcoa Highway (1958). He briefly lived in an apartment at 917 Woodland Ave. in North Knoxville. Famous as a successful songwriter by 1960, he later owned his own home in West Hills, at 8015 Corteland Dr.; later still, after separating from his wife, he lived at Hamilton House, the condo building in Sequoyah Hills.

 

Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943) is a poet who in her youth was associated with the radical Black Power movement. Born in Knoxville, she lived here during her early years, but after her parents moved to Cincinnati, she returned to spend summers with her grandmother (Emma Louvenia T. Watson). She has chronicled the damage done to the functional Black community as she knew it, when her grandmother lived at 400 Mulvaney Street, destroyed in the early 1960s. Her grandmother’s post-urban renewal home was much farther east, at 2533 Linden Ave. The poet has described her grandmother’s forced removal, and though she lived there in a good house for several more years, she was never happy there. In a memoir Giovanni stated, “something called progress killed my grandmother.”

 

Richard Graf (1863-1940) was a notable architect of the early 20^th century, credited with the Arcade Building and Sterchi Brothers building on Gay Street as well as St. John’s Lutheran. His last home has been reported to be the unusual Prairie-Style house, built in 1924 at 325 Woodlawn Pike in South Knoxville. Pending further research it’s unclear when he lived where, as most city directories of his later years have him living at 504 Emoriland Blvd. in North Knoxville, and later at an unknown place called “Ellis,” as well as at Powell Station. His sons Herbert and John Graf, who were also architects in his firm, one or both of whom reputedly designed the house on Woodlawn, lived respectively  at 38 and 7 Nokomis Circle in Sequoyah Hills (addresses need to be translated) in 1930. John seems to have left town in the early 1930s, but Herbert remained, living at 2220 White Ave. and later 1722 White Ave. (Neither of those addresses appear to indicate existing houses.)

 

John Webb Green (1859-1957), an early member of the Webb family to settle in Knoxville, was a prominent attorney and author who helped create Fountain City Park; later, he and his wife, Ellen McClung Webb, endowed UT’s McClung Museum, named in honor of her father. They both lived in at the house known as Ridgeview II, built in 1922 on Walkup Drive along Black Oak Ridge overlooking Fountain City. (House is believed to be still standing; need current number.)

 

Alex Haley (1921-1992), author, was born in West Tennessee, but moved to the Knoxville area in semi-retirement, ca. 1986. His best-known Knoxville home was at 840 Cherokee Boulevard. Although the famous author of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X had a better-known home in rural Norris, as well as a condo on the bluff on the south side of the river, he lived in this large house for two or three years in the late 1980s, and was pictured raking leaves here in a People magazine profile.

 

 

William Hastie (1904-1976) was the first Black federal judge in the U.S., and also served as governor of U.S. Virgin Islands. His childhood home was at the northwest corner of Woodlawn at Moody at 637 Woodlawn Pike.

 

Bill Haslam (b. 1958), businessman and Knoxville mayor, served as governor of Tennessee from 2011 to 2019. He grew up at 1039 Scenic Drive, where his parents lived when he was born. By the 1970s, the Haslams lived in the old Vandeventer home off Lyons Bend. He later lived on Sherwood Drive, in Westmoreland. [need number address]

 

B.F. Henry was an editor and music critic for the Washington Post whose humorous remark about the Beatles effects on hubcap theft in 1964 is often quoted. He grew up in the Fourth and Gill neighborhood, at 933 Luttrell, and lived there when he began his career in journalism, as an arts editor for the News-Sentinel. Before he left town, he lived in his own home, an unnumbered address on Montview Drive in Holston Hills, until he left town in1944.

 

John C. Hodges (1892-1967) was an English literature scholar at UT and nationally known grammarian, author of the Hodges-Harbrace Handbook. UT’s main library is named for him. He lived at 1908 White Avenue in 1930, in a house long since torn down for hospital parking. After World War II, he and his wife, Cornelia, lived at 8 Hillvale Circle in Sequoyah Hills, a house which by the 21^st century bore the address of 3608 HIllvale Circle. Poet Carl Sandburg stayed with Hodges during visits in the 1940s and ‘50s. Cornelia Hodges continued living there for about 40 years after Hodges’ death.

 

Congressman John Jennings Jr. (1880-1956; in office 1939-1951) was originally from Jacksboro, Tenn., but lived throughout his congressional tenure, which included World War II, at 3339 Kingston Pike, in the Sequoyah Hills area, corresponding to the modern address of 3945 Kingston Pike. His widow, Pearnie, lived there for some years afterward.

 

Joseph Knaffl (1861-1938), son of Austrian immigrants, established himself as Knoxville’s premier artistic photographer of the late 19^th century; some of his works, notably the Knaffl Madonna, became nationally known. His house at 3738 Speedway Circle, only partly intact, is an anomaly; what remains of it stands almost five miles away from its original location. It still bears its original address number: 918. That was its 1890s address on Gay Street, at what’s now the location of the Andrew Johnson Hotel building. In 1926, when it was torn down for the hotel project, an enterprising developer salvaged most of its façade, including the front porch, as well as some interior features, and moved them to this suburban spot, along the former horse-racing track, to serve as a family home.

 

Charles Krutch (the younger; 1887-1981), best known as a photographer of TVA projects, lived downtown in a house no longer existing at 717 West Main, as late as 1943, but soon after that moved to 6609 Sherwood Drive, where he was sometimes visited by his famous younger brother, author Joseph Wood Krutch. At his death he left the city a surprise bequest that endowed the creation of what became known as Krutch Park in downtown Knoxville.

 

David Lilienthal (1899-1981) was one of the original directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and chairman of the organization during its most prolific dam-building era, and World War II; he was later chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. In a memoir he recalled that his first home in Knoxville  was on Island Home? He’s listed at 1800 Melrose in 1934. (If that address is correct, the house no longer exists.) Like most of TVA’s top executives, he eventually moved to the TVA town of Norris.

 

Henry Whitlow “Whitty” Logan (1884-1965) was a leading nurse in Knoxville, and led the founding of the local Red Cross as well as, later, the Knoxville Health Center, a pioneering initiative in offering free health care to women and babies in need. She was also an influential real-estate developer, mostly in partnership with her husband, N.E. Logan, much involved with his projects in Sequoyah Hills and Westmoreland. They lived together in a townhouse on Walnut Avenue, since demolished, but in her later years she lived with a female associate, Margaret Davies, at suburban 6007 Centerwood Drive in South Knoxville. Whitlow Logan Park in Sequoyah Hills is named for her.

 

Hattie Love (ca. 1895-1951) was an ice-cream manufacturer who in 1938 became Knoxville’s first female to be elected to City Council. She lived in North Knoxville, at 215 Pearl Place in 1930, at 603 Emoriland Blvd. in ’38, and at 1701 Ashewood Road in 1943. She died in 1951 while staying with a sister at 1345 Armstrong Ave., an address which may need translating.

 

Adelia Lutz (1859-1931), an early Paris-trained artist and socialite, grew up mostly at Bleak House, the home her father built, and later at Westwood, 3425 Kingston Pike, the extraordinary house built for her and her studio in 1890 until her death in 1931.

 

Joseph Mabry, in his dramatic career that ended with his death in a bizarre 1882 gunfight, was associated with several properties, including his final home at 1711 Dandridge Ave., which now operates as a house museum, but also with the home known as Cold Springs Farm, at 2639 Martin Luther King Blvd. in East Knoxville. Some parts of the house may date back to the 1820s. Mabry sold it to banker Thomas O’Conner in 1881, about a year before O’Conner shot Mabry to death. It was later a school for girls, and later still a retirement home.

 

David Madden (b. 1933), is a Knoxville-born novelist and short-story writer whose work has been reviewed nationally and sometimes interpreted for film. He has identified the house at 2722 Henegar as his most important childhood home.

 

 

 

Chas. W. Mathews (1921-2001), key NASA staffer, was manager of Gemini Program Office. His longtime childhood home was in the unusual modified Spanish-revival “castle” at 2945 Kenilworth Lane in North Hills.

 

The J.T. Mengel house on Wright’s Switch, now known as Westland, at the intersection of Sherwood Drive is better known for its architect, Alfred Clauss, than for its builder. Other than the Dunlap house on Scenic Drive, which was adapted from a model, this house dates to 1938 and is Knoxville’s oldest individually designed example of International Style Modernism. It’s design, much modified, is less striking than it was originally. The house may predate any of Clauss’s other Knoxville-area projects, including Little Switzerland. [need number]

 

Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023), is one of the most influential novelists of America’s recent era, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. He and his family reportedly lived briefly at three successive rental houses in Sequoyah Hills in the 1930s, including one at 418 Noelton Drive near Kingston Pike; then at 2648 Sherrod Road in south Knoxville. The family was living on rural Martin Mill at Artella Drive by 1943. That last house, the one most identified with the author and described in The Road, burned down in 2013.

 

Bruce McCarty (1920-2013) was a modernist architect who left a major mark on postwar Knoxville, and authored innovations of national consequence. Originally from Indiana, he first arrived in Knoxville undergoing training with the Army Air Force during World War II, but after marrying a local woman, Julia Hayes, and some further education at Princeton, he settled here around 1950. He lived briefly in the Fountain City area, but soon lived at 2267 Cherokee Boulevard. He remained there until they moved their family into a house of his own modernist design at 1536 Lyons Bend around 1959.

An unusual model concrete home at 509 West Hills Road, nationally famous for his 1955 design by McCarty, deserves a special mention. The Hotpoint House, named for a sponsor, was later the home of East Tennessee Community Design Center director Annette Anderson. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, an extraordinary distinction for any building whose architect was still alive and active.

 

Charles McClung McGhee (1828-1907) was one of East Tennessee’s most powerful business tycoons of the Gilded Age, a banker and industrialist who created a significant railroad, the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia. In 1885, he endowed the first durable public library in Knoxville, Lawson McGhee Library, named as a memorial for his daughter. He lived in a Victorian house at 501 Locust Street. Although radically redesigned in 1915, removing the Victorian frills to make it look more classical in design, the basic house still survives at the Masonic Lodge.

 

Albert Milani (1892-1977) was an Italian-born stonecutter and sculptor who moved to Knoxville around 1912. Milani lived at Hialeah Drive in 1930, only about half a mile from his work at Candoro, but later kept his home and studio at 3707 Sutherland Avenue, later listed as 3723 Sutherland Ave.

 

Arthur Morgan (1878-1975) was an academic from Ohio who became the first leader of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Strongly ideological, he prompted a biography called Roosevelt’s Utopian. He led the planning of the TVA town of Norris, where he moved, but before he did, he lived in an apartment in Maplehurst, from whence he moved, on Nov. 1, 1933, to the A.K. Pope home at 155 Spence Place (1933), in Island Home. [needs translation] He moved to the TVA town of Norris, which he planned himself, in 1935.

 

Ben A. Morton (1875-1952), wholesale grocer, built this house at 4084 Kingston Pike in 1927, at the end of his four-year term as mayor, when he played a bold and decisive role in helping the Great Smoky Mountains National Park become a reality. The lofty Morton Overlook in the Smokies is named in his honor.  The classic Georgian house, designed by A.B. Baumann, Jr., was featured as an excellent example of its style in the March, 1930, issue of Southern Architect and Building News.

 

 

John R. Neal (1876-1959) was an important attorney and law professor, founder of the John R. Neal School of Law. He was the original lead defense attorney in the John Scopes trial of 1925. He lived mostly in the Watauga Hotel on N. Gay Street, the lower part of which still exists on the east side of the 300 North block. What remains of the Watauga is the headquarters of the Alliance for Better Nonprofits at 318 N. Gay.

 

Patricia Neal (1926-2010) was an Academy Award-winning actress who acted in leading roles in several major motion pictures. Born in rural Kentucky, Neal grew up mainly in Knoxville and began acting here. The Neals lived at 2643 Linden Ave. in 1930 [translate]; Neal later recalled acting on the front porch, as if it was a stage. Her last Knoxville address is Apartment A at 1415 Kenesaw, Sequoyah Village Apartments, where she lived in 1943, just before she went off to college and Hollywood.

 

 

Robert Neyland (1892-1962) was the most influential coach of the Tennessee Volunteers football team. Perhaps because he was still on call as an Army officer, he seems to have lived in mostly rental places in Knoxville, though he lived here for the better part of 36 years. His first listed address is 617 19^th Street (that block is purely parking today), but then for about three years at 2111 Terrace Ave., a house where he experienced his first triumphs and created what we know as Volmania; it was only recently torn down. In 1930-31 he lived at 704 17^th Street, a block which today has no houses. After a short time in Chattanooga, he returned to a house at what was then 2627 Kingston Pike, perhaps just for one year. (Since that probably has a different number today, further research is needed to determine which house that was.) After another period with the Army, Neyland and his family lived in a house on suburban Sherwood Drive from about 1937 to 1941, in Westmoreland (in what was then unincorporated Bearden), but no number is available. This was during the period the Vols were nationally famous, unscored upon for one whole season, and then an invitation to the Rose Bowl, but it may require personal research to know which house it was. Most of the old houses on Sherwood still exist.

After service overseas during World War II, during which time he became a brigadier general, Neyland returned to Knoxville where he and his family lived in apartments not far from campus. In 1945 they’re listed at 1443 Kenesaw Ave. Apt. A, in what’s now known as Sequoyah Village. By the following year, they were living in a probably larger apartment, Apt. 4 of the Reed Apartments at what’s now 3039 Kingston Pike. It was his home from 1946 through 1954, a period that included what may be his greatest triumph as a football coach, the championship season of 1951. The Neylands are listed living at 2633 Kingston Pike, a little closer to campus, for a long period and probably for the rest of Neyland’s life. That address corresponds to what was known as the Kingston Pike Motel, at the corner of Concord Street. Not a typical motel, it was actually a large brick 1870s house sometimes known as Oakwood, which was once known as the Howard-Henderson Hospital, recently divided into several apartments. By 1955, it had an association with UT’s athletic department as a place for new coaches to stay while they shopped for a home in Knoxville; while the Neylands lived there, it was also the home of Madeline Kneberg, an anthropology professor and co-founder of the McClung Museum. The modernist glass-and-steel IBM office opened right in front of the old house in 1959, when the Neylands lived there. Neyland Stadium was formally named for the retired coach while he was still alive and living at that address. At the time he died, the Motel was being renovated as a nursing home.

 

John T. O’Connor (1881-1968), a boxer and machinist who grew up in old Irish Town, was a community leader who served as mayor of Knoxville 1930-34, playing a role in establishing federal relief for cities via the U.S. Conference of Mayors, but he also held several other important offices. In 1936, he ran for U.S. Congress, and came closer to winning the seat than any other Democrat since before the Civil War. He lived for many years at 351 Chamberlain Blvd. [needs translation] in South Knoxville’s Lindbergh Forest. The John T. O’Connor Center was named in his honor a few years before his death.

 

Francis Alexander Ramsey (1764-1820), originally from Pennsylvania, who as clerk of the first state Senate of Tennessee in 1796, was an important early figure in local and state history who built this unusual stone house at 2614 Thorngrove Pike in 1797, on a design by English-trained furniture maker and sometime architect Thomas Hope. It’s one of Hope’s two known surviving houses, and has been claimed to be the first structure built primarily of Tennessee marble. Besides Ramsey and Hope, the house is associated with several other notable figures, including Ramsey’s wife, Margaret (1777-1854), who was the only woman involved in an early library effort, and was at one time owner of the Lamar House. It was the childhood home of Dr. J.G.M. Ramsey (1797-1884), one of Tennessee’s first notable historians and probably Knoxville’s most outspoken native secessionist; and Frank A. Ramsey (1821-1884), a well-known physician and surgeon, as well as a writer and editor of medical journals. The subject of a preservation effort I the 1930s, the house, sometimes known as Swan Pond for a now-vanished water feature nearby, has operated as a museum for many years.

 

M.L. Ross (1850-1899) was a wholesale grocer and candy manufacturer who built this Baumann Brothers-designed house at 1415 Laurel Avenue in 1893, six years before his premature death. Its interior was redesigned for apartments in 1916 in a way that has been called “an excellent example of sensitive adaptive use.”  Ross was the father of William Cary Ross (1879-1956), one of Knoxville’s most influential businessmen of the early 20^th century, who lived in this house in his youth. He led the construction of the Farragut Hotel and was an early founder of Cherokee Country Club.

 

Mary Utopia Rothrock (1890-1976) was the first female leader of Knoxville’s Lawson McGhee Library, and was so respected she was recruited to become TVA’s librarian in the 1930s, whereupon she began to gain national attention for her innovative ideas. She was editor of The French Broad – Holston Country, the 1946 compendium that is the only published history of Knox County. She lived for many years on Kingston Pike—originally 3216, later numbered as 3740 Kingston Pike.

 

 

William Rule (1839-1928), a Union officer in the Civil War, worked as a journalist, mostly as a newspaper editor, for more than 60 years. Author of the first book-length history of Knoxville, and important mentor to New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs. His final home stands at 1604 Clinch Avenue.

 

 

 

Bernadotte Schmitt (1886-1969) was the historian who authored The Coming of War: 1914, which earned the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1931. His childhood and college-era home stands on the northwest corner of Clinch Ave. and 13^th Street in Fort Sanders, though it was moved there from its original location on White Avenue and 14^th. In one of his books, he recalls learning about the war’s beginning in 1914 when a newspaper landed on that porch.

 

Dorothy South (1884-1964) was a singer whose fame extended beyond Knoxville, known at one time on Broadway for her performances in operettas. Her childhood home is at 4105 Tazewell Pike. Built in 1885, it’s sometimes known as the McMillan-Brewer Mansion.

 

Sterchi Audigier house, 2651 Magnolia Ave. Originally the late-life home of William H. Sterchi (1862-1929), one of the lesser-known Sterchi Brothers, who founded the major furniture company in the 1890s, and went on to create or operate several smaller wholesale and retail businesses. Sterchi died suddenly at the home in 1929, but his widow remained into the mid-1930s. It was later for a short time, the home of Louis B. Audigier. The journalist and essayist who spent much of his career in Rome was the widowed former husband of Eleanor Audigier, the influential patron of the arts during the Nicholson Art League period. She died in Rome in 1931. Louis returned to Knoxville five years later with a second wife named Carro Greene, and purchased this house in 1936, at which time it was described as “one of Knoxville’s showplaces.” He announced it would be called “Villa Caro.” However, they lived in the house for little more than a year, part of which time Audigier spent in poor health on the Riviera. (He did recover enough to return to Knoxville after the sale of the house, and lived at least briefly at the Andrew Johnson Hotel, but eventually settled with relatives in Little Rock, where he died in 1943.) By the 1940s, under new ownership, the house was a tourist hotel, and later a fraternal lodge.

 

Carl Sublett (1919-2008), one of Knoxville’s best known artists of the modern era, made notable experiments in modernism and pop art, but became best known for his watercolor landscapes, both in East Tennessee and in Maine. He and his wife, Helen, lived briefly at 2807 Magnolia Avenue before moving to 611 Phillips Ave., a modest house on the south side of the river near Suttree Landing Park, where they lived for about four years. In 1961, during the era of the Knoxville 7 art collective, of which he was a leading member, they moved to 2104 Lake Ave., near the university. They remained in that house for about 25 years, during which time it became known as a gathering place for artists. The Sublett Gallery, on Laurel Avenue at 11^th Street, was established in the late 1980s to display his work, and lasted for several years before it became a coffee house.

 

Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963) is a provocative Hollywood director and screenwriter. His first home (?) 301 Bedford Dr., the address of his mother as reported in the newspaper at the time of his birth, may or may not still exist in the modest hillside neighborhood in East Knoxville; later suburban home on Bluegrass Road.

 

 

Judge Robert Taylor (1899-1987) was a longtime federal judge, subject of a book, who passed the ruling that Clinton High would have to desegregate. He lived for many years with his wife and children, including daughter, Ann Taylor, future NPR radio journalist, in Sequoyah Hills at 3567 Talahi Drive. She would later recall that her father received death threats over the decision, and that as a student she would feel obliged to enter the house from behind.

 

Mary Boyce Temple (1856-1929) was daughter of well-known attorney and author Oliver Perry Temple. Never married but well-connected, she was involved in welfare work, and attended several world’s fairs, including those in Paris, as a commissioner, and was an early leader of the League of Women Voters. She lived in the roomy house at 623 Hill Ave. at Henley in her later years. One of Knoxville’s first preservationists, she is credited with launching the initiative to save Blount Mansion, her State Street neighbor.

 

Jim Thompson (1880-1976) was Knoxville’s most prolific photographer of the early 20^th century, especially known for his vital role in establishing the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a project that gave him some national renown. His family lived in the downtown area during his youth, reputedly even in Blount Mansion for a short time, but also at 713 East Church Ave, near where his photographic studio was located. He settled in Sequoyah Hills around 1925, during the first wave of development in the neighborhood, at an address first listed as 419 Scenic Drive, what’s now known as 901 Scenic. When he moved in, his labor of love, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, was no sure thing; he did much of his critical work developing and promoting the park while living here. Thompson lived in the house for about half a century, until his death in 1976.

 

Mortimer Thompson (1858-1939), father of Jim Thompson, was a city planner, architect of sorts, and portrait artist, known for his portraits of several mayors. In later years he lived in a “pentagonal house” at 199 Arrowhead Trail (1931, 1939), built in 1924 (date according to his own memory). That address appears to coincide with the modern address of 559 Arrowhead. His widow, Hattie, appears to have lived there for several years after Mortimer’s death.

 

 

Hugh Tyler (1888-1976) was the artistic relative James Agee referred to as “Uncle Andrew” in the autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, but was a well-known artist in his day, associated with the Nicholson Art League. The Tyler home on the 1100 block of Clinch Avenue in Fort Sanders no longer exist, but the artist returned to Knoxville temporarily in the last 1920s and early ‘30s, when he was working on interior décor for Church Street Methodist Church and Hoskins Library, both Charlie Barber projects. At that time, he and his family lived in a simple bungalow at 924 Southgate Road at Sagwa, in Sequoyah Hills.

 

David Van Vactor (1906-1994), originally from Indiana, was a nationally known composer who conducted several orchestral recordings. He moved to Knoxville in 1947 and served for 25 years as conductor of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra; for most of that period, he lived on at 2623 Kingston Pike, later cited as 2824 Kingston Pike, and was known for his riverside parties.

 

Cas Walker (1992-1998) was a prominent retail groceryman who after moving from his home in Sevier County to Knoxville in the late 1920s, served on City Council for over 30 years, published a memorable newspaper, and became known as a pioneer radio and television broadcaster, best remembered for helping launch the career of Dolly Parton. Walker’s early years (1930, 1943) were spent at 3617 Linden Avenue, but he spent his last half-century in a ridgetop house with a view of the hills of his native Sevier County, at 2838 Gaston Avenue in the North Hills area.

 

Roland Wank (1898-1970) was a Hungarian-born modernist architect who was well known for work in Cincinnati and elsewhere before he accepted a job as TVA’s first chief architect. Wank lived at 3310 Woodhill Place in his first Knoxville years from 1933 to 1937, during which the Norris dam and community were both created, and when other notable architects like Alfred Clauss were hired. Like several of TVA’s earliest leaders, he later moved to Norris, a town he had helped design. That address appears to be the modern-day address of 3835 Woodhill Place, an interesting house of an early 20^th century style that appears to still exist as a residence.

 

Architect L.C. Waters designed a bungalow at 4633 Lyons View in 1914, becoming one of the first affluent professionals to settle on this formerly remote country road. In his career, Waters designed the Beaumont School, which still exists, though much expanded, and the well-known Emporium Building on Gay Street.

 

Don Whitehead (1908-1991) was a Kentucky-born journalist who became best known as a war correspondent, winning two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting during the Korean War era; he also wrote well-known books about the FBI, one of which was interpreted as a popular movie. He had begun his career in Knoxville, and returned in semi-retirement in the late 1950s, working mainly as a newspaper columnist. He lived for several years in suburban West Knox County, but later lived in Hamilton House in Sequoyah Hills.