Crowds Sept 7 1918

Over There!  Recognize anybody? This is a crowd scene from Gay Street, 103 years ago this week, family and friends seeing off their favorite recruits as they left on the Southern Railway for training at Camp Sevier in South Carolina, many of them bound eventually for Europe, and trench warfare. It’s apparently the steeply hilly old 100 block, just a year or two before the viaduct raised it to a more perfect flatness, covering up the lower floors of several buildings in the process. It’s safe to say that about a year later, many of the people in this photograph, in and out of uniform, were coming down with something they called the Spanish Flu. That lethal virus was responsible for the deaths of about 200 Knoxvillians, not counting the soldiers who caught it in Europe. Shared by Cindy and Mark Proteau.