The Inconvenient Chapel

Bearden’s old Christian Church is not exactly what we thought it was, but maybe more

 

The simple old white frame church seems a little overpowered by its ample bell tower. From a distance it could look something like the forecastle of a wood-plank riverboat beached on the rise overlooking Kingston Pike in Bearden.

 

 

Many of us grew up vaguely aware of that old Christian Church, but it has been surprising us in recent years. One of the more theologically basic denominations, it opened here to serve a mostly rural congregation. In the last 20^th century, it became a Korean-language Christian Church. Later still, it became something called the Royal Chaplain Corps, an exotic name for what has been described as a gathering place for emergency professionals.

It was always modest, never a showy place seeking to draw attention to itself. But in the last few weeks, the old church has displayed a big colorful banner of a sort I’ve never seen before anywhere.

THIS 1885 CHAPEL FOR SALE

MUST RELOCATE TO YOUR PROPERTY / VENUE

CALL JOSH

865.482.1214

That’s a pretty extraordinary approach to any inconvenient building. Developers who propose demolishing a historic building—including some very large, respected institutional developers—have been known to tell preservationists, well, if you like it so much, take it. You just need to move it somewhere else. The theory is that it eases any responsibility for historical preservation away from the landowner and toward the community who ostensibly value it.

Even when the building is offered for free, and the developer is cooperative about delaying a project until it can be moved, it rarely works. The successful historic-building moves I’ve witnessed in the last 30 years worked only when the move was a very short distance, to a space owned by the mover that happens to be within two or three blocks of the original site. Even then, utility and cable lines sometimes make it impossible. Often the big corporations who own the wires overhead just aren’t willing to budge.

But when it does work, of course, the building is considered an artifact, no longer a historic site, and maybe not even a work of architecture. It will not be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, or any of the resulting tax credits it might deserve if it’s allowed to stay in its original location.

Giving a building away to a recipient with the wherewithal to move it is always cheaper than demolishing it. I’ve never heard of a Knoxville developer offering to sell a historic building with the proviso that it has to be moved.

But who knows. Maybe it’ll work this time.

***

The old Christian Church is one of the oldest structures in the historic center of Bearden. But it may not be exactly what it seems.

We did a deep dive into the history of that building, and found out that both the developers and neighbors who’d rather keep the old church where it is may be laboring under a misconception.

It’s actually not an 1885 church building, but it’s easy to make that mistake. In our 2020 Historic Bearden book, we noted that it was “believed to date back to 1883.” No one has ever corrected us on that.

But we have more comprehensive digital resources now than we did when we did that research, and learned more about it just this month. There was indeed a church there in 1883, and its roots seem to go back on this site a few years before that. But it wasn’t this building.

The current building does look like an old rural church, and several published stories indicating that it was built in the 1880s may reflect the old Sunday-School doctrine that a church is not a building, but a congregation. Sometimes a congregation occupies one building, sometimes a series of buildings on the same site. The churchyard behind it is definitely from that era; some of its 35-odd graves date back to 1881. Several old families recognizable as old Knoxville or Bearden names: Gore, Craig, Knott, Roehl—are represented there. But with perhaps only one exception, they were all planted behind a different building.

What became known as Bearden Christian Church comes with an unusually interesting story. The Christian Church was and still is an idealistic 19^th-century effort to unify the congregations by focusing on the core values of Christianity. It was sometimes called a Campbellite church, named for an Irish-born Presbyterian minister named Thomas Campbell (1763-1854), who founded the movement in Western Pennsylvania in the early 19^th century. Although many parishioners disliked the term “Campbellites,” which was often used by those who opposed it, the term was sometimes used routinely in Knoxville. An early description of Bearden in the 1880s notes that the community had only two churches: “one Presbyterian, one Campbellite.”

Members of this church preferred to call themselves, simply, Christians, because their intent was to get away from denominational labels.

Another such church was formed in 1874 in downtown Knoxville, eventually known as the Park Street (or Avenue) Church, later as First Christian. Its later 1915 church, an architectural monument on Fifth Avenue, remains there, and used, but lately serves a modern congregation called The Point. It’s also as a venue of the Big Ears Festival.

It was also in the 1870s, church historians have noted, that a suburban Christian church of like-minded believers was founded in Erin, the rural community several miles to the west of Knoxville, before the area was known as Bearden. Long memories once claimed that a grove of trees on this same site witnessed some Christian services in 1876.

There are Knoxville newspaper references to the Christian Church at Erin as early as 1882, when there’s an announcement of a Christmas event hosted by “the Ladies of the Christian Church at Erin Station.”

Bearden was still called Erin, ostensibly for the early Irish community there, and was so unfamiliar to Knoxvillians that its distance had to be described. In those days, most Knoxvillians could more easily get there by train, by the old East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia line, than by any other means. The actual train station, hardly a stone’s throw from the church, was just around the corner, along what’s now Northshore—near the trestle that still crosses the busy street.

Maybe its most notable historic association is from its earliest days, when a very young charismatic preacher named Rev. Ashley S. Johnson (1857-1925) made a habit of the place, launched a series of sermons there on St. Patrick’s Day, 1882. That evening the 24-year-old “began a series of religious meetings at Erin Station, five miles from Knoxville.” Rev. Johnson was the church’s most frequently advertised guest speaker in its early days. The remarkable young man was the great-grandson of Revolutionary veteran and early East Knox County settler Jacob Kimberlin, and became the first postmaster of the rural French Broad River community just then becoming known as Kimberlin Heights. Bearden is a long way from there, but Reverend Johnson got around. He was preaching in Ontario when he met Emma Strawn, the Canadian woman he brought back to Tennessee as his wife.

He had been a familiar face in Bearden for at least 10 years when he surprised the congregation with a sermon there in 1892, with an announcement. He intended to found a college, to be called The School of the Evangelists.

“I am not seeking money,” he told them. “I am seeking encouragement.” After his talk, a Bearden parishioner, a Union veteran named William F. Crippen, approached him and gave encouragement in the form of a $100 gift.

That moment at this site in Bearden has become part of the founding legend of Johnson University. It was the first announcement of the school that would later be renamed Johnson Bible College, and which has been known since 2011 as Johnson University—a nationally known university that specializes in training Christian pastors. At the Kimberlin Heights campus today are almost 1,000 students, most of them from states other than Tennessee, and many of them from other nations. The faith, known informally and non-denominationally as “Christian churches and churches of Christ,” is better known in the Midwest than in East Tennessee.

Rev. Johnson maintained a relationship with this little church until at least 1902, when he returned to conduct the funeral of Mrs. W.F. Crippen, wife of the early Johnson donor—by whose name the community was briefly known before it became Bearden—and who had given Johnson his first “encouragement” to found a college.

The Crippens were buried a few miles away at New Gray, but there are more than 30 graves just behind the chapel.

The most noticeable grave today, and perhaps one of the more dramatic burials in the churchyard’s history, was that of 20-year-old Julia Ann Lamons, a young mother. Her grave is inscribed “KILLED IN NEW MARKET TRAIN WRECK / Sept. 24, 1904 / Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.”

The New Market Train Wreck, the collision of two Southern passenger trains on that date, was the deadliest peacetime disaster in East Tennessee history. Confusion after the wreck led to several different estimates of its death toll. The official count is that 56 died that day. Lamons is the only grave I have seen that references the wreck by name.

Her husband and son were both injured in the wreck, and her husband was one of a few who sued Southern over damages.

There’s one faded stone, a regulation military stone of a Civil War soldier of the U.S. 6^th Tenn. Infantry. It’s been there in the weather for a very long time. I can’t make out his name.

***

Ironically, people being people, there developed a schism between different parts of this idealistic unification movement. Downtown Knoxville’s First Christian Church became associated with the Disciples of Christ denomination, a related but more traditionally structured organization.

The Erin, or Bearden church, sometimes known as the Bearden Church of Christ, had its heyday. Even though it would be almost half a century before this stretch of Kingston Pike would be considered part of Knoxville, by 1913, the little country church, still well outside Knoxville’s city limits, was listing itself as the First Christian Church in the Knoxville city directories.

But that World War I era saw the dissipation of some of its congregation. The first generation of organizers were dying off, and others were enticed by the Disciples of Christ, especially when they built such an impressively large and beautiful sanctuary downtown. By then, there were electric streetcars to and from Bearden, and it was no longer hard to get downtown. The old church where Rev. Johnson had spoken so memorably seems to disappear around 1921. Except for a spouse or two, the graveyard was retired from use. After a couple of years of vacancy, the original 1880s church was torn down.

Rev. Johnson, who seems to have been universally beloved, was 67 when he died in Baltimore in early 1925. He was buried on the Kimberlin Heights campus of his college. Perhaps it was Johnson’s unexpected death that prompted some sentimentalists to revive the Bearden church. Within weeks, they had obtained lumber and hardware for a new church, and by early spring, were hard at work.

On April 19, 1925, Former mayor, Union veteran, and lifelong journalist Capt. William Rule’s Knoxville Journal declared the effort to be “the reorganization of one of the oldest churches in its community, and the construction of a new house of worship.” The morning newspaper elaborated with the churches’ story.

“Bearden Christian Church is historic and was once one of the strongest churches in Knox County. But about 10 years ago, the church began to decline. Many members moved away, others died, and some joined other churches of the Disciples of Christ. Finally the church had no pastor, and several years ago the church building was torn away. But a small remnant of the congregation still retained their loyalty and love for the old church, and a few weeks ago, with the help of others, built a new house of worship.

“The framework was erected by volunteer labor, and was practically completed in one day. Worship was held in the church that night. Since then it has been entirely completed and is a structure good for a number of years of service.”

A long series of revival services that April celebrated its completion.

So the building now being offered for sale isn’t a 19^th century building after all. It is, as of this month, almost exactly 99 years old, and still one of the oldest structures in Bearden. Older than anything I can think of,  in fact, except for the antebellum Reynolds house up on the top of Bearden Hill.

The church building, as it is, has witnessed radical changes to the landscape. When it was built, a passenger railroad, the Southern Railway, rolled by several times a day just behind and within sight of the church. It stopped pausing at the Bearden station several years before it quit altogether in 1970.

Now only freight trains use that track.

As this building was completed, the national road known as the Dixie Highway was bringing traffic through here, much of it Chicago-area Midwesterners bound for Florida. There commenced a period of about 35 years when Bearden rapidly changed to serve the tourist industry, and became familiar to much of the nation, as a tourist-court spot, a stopover for families in Model A Fords about halfway to the beach. It’s safe to say that during the church’s first 30 years, hundreds of thousands of American motorists saw it.

Bearden School evolved within sight of the church. The existing old Bearden School building was built in 1938, when it was a high school. The church building was about 30 years old when they built the shopping center across the street.

One of its longest ministers to preside was Rev. Barry S. McLean, who had previously pastored churches in Canada. He arrived in 1953, and remained almost 20 years. Perhaps like other pastors, he and his family of four lived at the church’s address, in a “flat top,” a familiar postwar name for a portable building used during the postwar population boom; perhaps it was something like what we see today, converted into the church’s western wing. During his era, the church expanded a bit to include a kitchen and library. It maintained its relationship with Johnson Bible College, which produced most of its educated leadership.

Even though it’s not nearly as old as many of us thought it was, the 1925 Christian Church building is still Bearden’s oldest non-residential building.

When the congregation drifted away, the Christian Church donated it to an offbeat religious leader named David Trempe, a graduate of Johnson Bible College, to become the chapel of his new Royal Chaplain Corps ministry, described as a refuge for first responders and others dealing with trauma. It would be, he said, “like a MASH unit to stop the spiritual hemorrhaging.” Trempe restored the building elaborately, using donated work and materials for the purpose, restoring the hardwood floors and resurrecting the original bell to hang in a new belfry. At the time, it was reported that by the terms of the quitclaim deed, if it were ever used for any other purpose, it would have to be a nonprofit organization.

Developer Tony Cappiello, who also owns the prewar house next door that’s now home to Pelican Snowballs, purchased the building in 2017. In 2018, he told the Shopper-News, “I appreciate old buildings. Whenever I can, I try to save them. In this case, I should be able to do that.” His plans at the time were to make it available as an event space and for use by nonprofits. “It’s such a lovely chapel,” he added. “I want to keep it there.”

Something may have changed.

But that old 1880s-1920s graveyard is still back there. I trust it’s not part of the deal.

By Jack Neely