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The story
Founded by James White in 1786.1
History
Early history
The first people to form substantial settlements in what is now Knoxville were indigenous people who arrived during the Woodland period (c. 1000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.). One of the oldest artificial structures in Knoxville is a burial mound constructed during the early Mississippian culture period (c. 1000–1400 A.D.). The earthwork mound was preserved, but the University of Tennessee campus developed around it.
Other prehistoric sites include an Early Woodland habitation area at the confluence of the Tennessee River and Knob Creek (near the Knox–Blount county line) and Dallas phase Mississippian villages at Post Oak Island (also along the river near the Knox–Blount line) and at Bussell Island (at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River near Lenoir City).
By the 18th century, the Cherokee, an Iroquoian language people, had become the dominant tribe in the East Tennessee region. They are believed to have migrated from the Great Lakes region centuries earlier. They were frequently at war with the Creek and Shawnee.
The Cherokee people called the Knoxville area kuwanda'talun'yi, which means "mulberry place". Most Cherokee habitation in the area concentrated in what American colonists called the Overhill settlements along the Little Tennessee River, southwest of Knoxville.
The first white traders and explorers arrived in the Tennessee Valley in the late 17th century. There is significant evidence that Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto visited Bussell Island in 1540.
However, the first major recorded Euro-American presence in the Knoxville area was the Timberlake Expedition, which passed through the area in December 1761 at the confluence of the Holston River and French Broad River into the Tennessee River. A British soldier and Anglo-American emissary from the Thirteen Colonies to the Overhill settlements, Henry Timberlake appreciated the Tennessee's deep waters after his party had spent several weeks struggling down the relatively shallow Holston.
Settlement
The end of the French and Indian War in 1763 and the confusion brought about by the American Revolution led to a drastic increase in Euro-American settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. By the 1780s, white settlers were already established in the Holston and French Broad valleys. In 1785 the U.S. Congress ordered all illegal settlers out of the valley but to little effect. Settlers continued to trickle into Cherokee lands, and tensions between the settlers and the Cherokee rose.
In 1786, James White, a Revolutionary War officer, and his friend James Connor built White's Fort near the mouth of First Creek, on land White had purchased three years earlier. In 1790, White's son-in-law, Charles McClung—who had arrived from Pennsylvania the previous year—surveyed White's holdings between First Creek and Second Creek for the establishment of a town. McClung drew up sixty-four 0.5-acre (0.20 ha) lots. The waterfront was set aside for a town common. Two lots were set aside for a church and graveyard (First Presbyterian Church, founded 1792). Four lots were set aside for a school. That school was eventually chartered as Blount College and it served as the starting point for the University of Tennessee, which uses Blount College's founding date of 1794 as its own.
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In 1790, President George Washington appointed North Carolina surveyor William Blount governor of the newly created Territory South of the River Ohio. One of Blount's first tasks was to meet with the Cherokee and establish territorial boundaries and resolve the issue of illegal settlers. This he accomplished almost immediately with the Treaty of Holston, which was negotiated and signed at White's Fort in 1791. Blount originally wanted to place the territorial capital at the confluence of the Clinch River and Tennessee River (now Kingston), but when the Cherokee refused to cede this land, Blount chose White's Fort. Blount named the new capital Knoxville after Revolutionary War General and Secretary of War Henry Knox, who at the time was Blount's immediate superior.
Problems immediately arose from the Treaty of Holston. Blount believed that he had "purchased" much of what is now East Tennessee when the treaty was signed in 1791. However, the terms of the treaty came under dispute, culminating in ongoing violence on both sides. When the government invited Cherokee chief Hanging Maw for negotiations in 1793, Knoxville settlers attacked the Cherokee against orders, killing the chief's wife. Peace was renegotiated in 1794.
Antebellum era
Knoxville served as capital of the Southwest Territory and as capital of Tennessee (admitted as a state in 1796) until 1817, when the capital was moved to Murfreesboro. Early Knoxville has been described as an "alternately quiet and rowdy river town". Early issues of the Knoxville Gazette—the first newspaper published in Tennessee—are filled with accounts of murder, theft, and hostile Cherokee attacks. Abishai Thomas, a friend of William Blount, visited Knoxville in 1794 and wrote that, while he was impressed by the town's modern frame buildings, the town had "seven taverns" and no church.
Knoxville initially thrived as a way station for travelers and migrants heading west. Its location at the confluence of three major rivers in the Tennessee Valley brought flatboat and later steamboat traffic to its waterfront in the first half of the 19th century, and Knoxville quickly developed into a regional merchandising center. Local agricultural products—especially tobacco, corn, and whiskey—were traded for cotton, which was grown in the Deep South. The population of Knoxville more than doubled in the 1850s with the arrival of the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad in 1855.
Among the most prominent citizens of Knoxville during the Antebellum years was James White's son, Hugh Lawson White (1773–1840). White first served as a judge and state senator, before being nominated by the state legislature to replace Andrew Jackson in the U.S. Senate in 1825. In 1836, White ran unsuccessfully for president, representing the Whig Party.
American Civil War
Anti-slavery and anti-secession sentiment ran high in East Tennessee in the years leading up to the Civil War. William "Parson" Brownlow, the radical publisher of the Knoxville Whig, was one of the region's leading anti-secessionists (although he strongly defended the practice of slavery). Blount County, just south of Knoxville, had developed into a center of abolitionist activity, due in part to its relatively large Quaker faction and the anti-slavery president of Maryville College, Isaac Anderson. The Greater Warner Tabernacle AME Zion Church was reportedly a station on the Underground Railroad.
Business interests, however, guided largely by Knoxville's trade connections with cotton-growing centers to the south, contributed to the development of a strong pro-secession movement within the city. The city's pro-secessionists included among their ranks J. G. M. Ramsey, a prominent historian whose father had built the Ramsey House in 1797.
Thus, while East Tennessee and greater Knox County voted decisively against secession in 1861, the city of Knoxville favored secession by a 2–1 margin. In late May 1861, just before the secession vote, delegates of the East Tennessee Convention met at Temperance Hall in Knoxville in hopes of keeping Tennessee in the Union. After Tennessee voted to secede in June, the convention met in Greeneville and attempted to create a separate Union-aligned state in East Tennessee.
In July 1861, after Tennessee had joined the Confederacy, General Felix Zollicoffer arrived in Knoxville as commander of the District of East Tennessee. While initially lenient toward the city's Union sympathizers, Zollicoffer instituted martial law in November, after pro-Union guerrillas burned seven of the city's bridges. The command of the district passed briefly to George Crittenden and then to Kirby Smith, who launched an unsuccessful invasion of Kentucky in August 1862. In early 1863, General Simon Buckner took command of Confederate forces in Knoxville. Anticipating a Union invasion, Buckner fortified Fort Loudon (in West Knoxville, not to be confused with the colonial fort to the southwest) and began constructing earthworks throughout the city. However, the approach of stronger Union forces under Ambrose Burnside in the summer of 1863 forced Buckner to evacuate Knoxville before the earthworks were completed.
Burnside arrived in early September 1863, beginning the Knoxville campaign. Like the Confederates, he immediately began fortifying the city. The Union forces rebuilt Fort Loudon and erected 12 other forts and batteries flanked by entrenchments around the city. Burnside moved a pontoon bridge upstream from Loudon, allowing Union forces to cross the river and to build a series of forts along the heights of south Knoxville, including Fort Stanley and Fort Dickerson.
As Burnside was fortifying Knoxville, a Confederate army under Braxton Bragg defeated Union forces under William Rosecrans at the Battle of Chickamauga (near the Tennessee-Georgia line) and laid siege to Chattanooga. On November 3, 1863, the Confederates sent General James Longstreet to attack Burnside at Knoxville and prevent him from reinforcing the Union at Chattanooga. Longstreet wanted to attack the city from the south, but lacking the necessary pontoon bridges he was forced to cross the river further downstream at Loudon on November 14 and march against the city's heavily fortified western section. On November 15, General Joseph Wheeler unsuccessfully attempted to dislodge Union forces in the heights of south Knoxville, and the following day Longstreet failed to cut off retreating Union forces at the Battle of Campbell's Station (now Farragut).
On November 18, Union General William P. Sanders was mortally wounded while conducting delaying maneuvers west of Knoxville, and Fort Loudon was renamed Fort Sanders in his honor. On November 29, following a two-week siege, the Confederates attacked Fort Sanders but failed after a fierce 20-minute engagement. On December 4, after word of the Confederate defeat at Chattanooga reached Longstreet, he broke his siege of Knoxville. The Union victories in the Knoxville campaign and at Chattanooga put much of East Tennessee under Union control for the rest of the war.
Reconstruction and the Industrial Age
After the war, northern investors such as brothers Joseph and David Richards helped Knoxville recover relatively quickly. The Richards brothers convinced 104 Welsh immigrant families to migrate from the Welsh Tract in Pennsylvania to work in a rolling mill. These Welsh families settled in an area now known as Mechanicsville. The Richards brothers also co-founded the Knoxville Iron Works beside the L&N Railroad, also employing Welsh workers. Later, the site was used as the grounds for the 1982 World's Fair.
Other companies that sprang up during this period were Knoxville Woolen Mills, Dixie Cement, and Woodruff's Furniture. Between 1880 and 1887, 97 factories were established in Knoxville, most of them specializing in textiles, food products, and iron products. By the 1890s, Knoxville was home to more than 50 wholesaling houses, making it the third largest wholesaling center by volume in the South. The Candoro Marble Works, established in the community of Vestal in 1914, became the nation's foremost producer of pink marble and one of the nation's largest marble importers. In 1896, Knoxville celebrated its achievements by creating its own flag. The Flag of Knoxville, Tennessee represents the city's progressive growth due to agriculture and industry.
In 1869, Thomas Humes, a Union sympathizer and president of East Tennessee University, secured federal post-war damage reimbursement and state-designated Morrill Act funding to expand the college, which had been occupied by both armies during the war. Charles Dabney, who became president of the university in 1887, overhauled the faculty and established a law school in an attempt to modernize the scope of the university. In 1879, the state changed its name to the University of Tennessee, at the request of the trustees, who hoped to secure more funding from the Tennessee state legislature.
The post-war manufacturing boom brought thousands of immigrants to the city. The population of Knoxville grew from around 5,000 in 1860 to 32,637 in 1900. West Knoxville was annexed in 1897, and over 5,000 new homes were built between 1895 and 1904. In 1901, train robber Kid Curry (whose real name was Harvey Logan), a member of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch was captured after shooting two deputies on Knoxville's Central Avenue. He escaped from the Knoxville jail and rode away on a horse stolen from the sheriff.
Progressive Era and the Great Depression
Knoxville hosted the Appalachian Exposition in 1910 and 1911 and the National Conservation Exposition in 1913. The latter is sometimes credited with giving rise to the movement to create a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains, some 20 miles (32 km) south of Knoxville. Around this time, several affluent Knoxvillians began purchasing summer cottages in Elkmont and began to pursue the park idea more vigorously. They were led by Knoxville businessman Colonel David C. Chapman, who, as head of the Great Smoky Mountains Park Commission, was largely responsible for raising the funds for the purchase of the property that became the core of the park. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park opened in 1933.
Knoxville's reliance on a manufacturing economy left it particularly vulnerable to the effects of the Great Depression. The Tennessee Valley also suffered from frequent flooding, and millions of acres of farmland had been ruined by soil erosion. To control flooding and improve the economy in the Tennessee Valley, the federal government created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933. Beginning with Norris Dam, TVA constructed a series of hydroelectric dams and other power plants throughout the valley over the next few decades, bringing flood control, jobs, and electricity to the region. The Federal Works Projects Administration, which also arrived in the 1930s, helped build McGhee Tyson Airport and expand Neyland Stadium. TVA's headquarters, which consists of twin high rises built in the 1970s, were among Knoxville's first modern high-rise buildings.
In 1947, John Gunther dubbed Knoxville the "ugliest city" in America in his best-selling book Inside U.S.A. Gunther's description jolted the city into enacting a series of beautification measures that helped improve the appearance of the downtown area.
1982 World's Fair and 20th century
Knoxville's textile and manufacturing industries largely fell victim to foreign competition in the 1950s and 1960s, and after the establishment of the Interstate Highway System in the 1960s, the railroad—which had been largely responsible for Knoxville's industrial growth—began to decline. The rise of suburban shopping malls in the 1970s drew retail revenues away from Knoxville's downtown area. While government jobs and economic diversification prevented widespread unemployment in Knoxville, the city sought to recover the massive loss of revenue by attempting to annex neighboring communities. Knoxville annexed the communities of Bearden and Fountain City, which were Knoxville's largest suburbs, in 1962. Knoxville officials attempted the annexation of the neighboring Farragut-Concord community in western Knox County, but the city failed following the incorporation of Farragut in 1980. These annexation attempts often turned combative, and several attempts to consolidate Knoxville and Knox County into a metro government failed, while school boards and the planning commissions would merge on July 1, 1987.
With further annexation attempts stalling, Knoxville initiated several projects aimed at boosting revenue in its downtown area. The 1982 World's Fair—the most successful of these projects, with eleven million visitors—became one of the most popular expositions in U.S. history. The Rubik's Cube made its debut at this event. The fair's energy theme was selected because Knoxville was home to TVA's headquarters and for its proximity to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Sunsphere, a 266-foot (81 m) steel truss structure topped with a gold-colored glass sphere, was built for the fair and remains one of Knoxville's most prominent structures, along with the adjacent Tennessee Amphitheater.
During the 1980s and into the 1990s, the city would see one of its largest expansions of its city limits, with a reported 26 square miles of "shoestring annexation" under the administration of Mayor Victor Ashe. Ashe's efforts were controversial, largely consisting of annexation of interstate right-of-ways, highway-oriented commercial clusters, and residential subdivisions to increase tax revenue for the city. Residents voiced opposition, citing claims of urban sprawl and government overreach.
21st century and economic renaissance
Knoxville's downtown has been developing, with the opening of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and the Knoxville Convention Center, the redevelopment of Market Square, a new visitors center, a regional history museum, a Regal Cinemas theater, several restaurants and bars, and many new and redeveloped condominiums. Since 2000, Knoxville has successfully brought business back to the downtown area. The arts in particular have begun to flourish; there are multiple venues for outdoor concerts, and Gay Street hosts a new arts annex and gallery surrounded by many studios and new businesses as well. The Bijou and Tennessee Theatres underwent renovation, providing an initiative for the city and its developers to re-purpose the old downtown.
Development has also expanded across the Tennessee River on the South Knoxville waterfront. In 2006, the city adopted the South Waterfront Vision Plan, a long-term improvement project to revitalize the 750-acre waterfront fronting three miles of shoreline on the Tennessee River. The project's primary focus is the commercial and residential development over a 20-year timeline. Knoxville Baptist Hospital, located on the waterfront, was demolished in 2016 to make room for a mixed-use project called One Riverwalk. The development consisted of three office buildings, including a headquarters for Regal Entertainment Group, a hotel, student housing, and 300 multi-family residential units.
In June 2020, the Knoxville City Council announced the investment of over $5.5 million in federal and local funds towards the development of a business park along the Interstate 275 corridor in North Knoxville. The project was first proposed by a study prepared Knoxville-Knox County Metropolitan Planning Commission in 2007. In August 2020, UT President and Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd announced plans of a mixed-use baseball stadium complex in the Old City neighborhood.
2020 census
As of the 2020 census, Knoxville had a population of 190,740 residents in 82,857 households and 41,073 families. The median age was 33.3 years, with 18.7% under the age of 18 and 14.5% aged 65 or older; 16.5% were between 18 and 24, 29.0% were 25 to 44, and 21.3% were 45 to 64. For every 100 females there were 92.4 males, and for every 100 females age 18 and over there were 90.2 males age 18 and over.
99.9% of residents lived in urban areas, while 0.1% lived in rural areas.
There were 82,857 households in Knoxville, of which 23.0% had children under the age of 18 living in them. Of all households, 30.6% were married-couple households, 25.0% were households with a male householder and no spouse or partner present, and 36.1% were households with a female householder and no spouse or partner present. About 38.6% of all households were made up of individuals and 11.8% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older.
There were 91,908 housing units, of which 9.8% were vacant. The homeowner vacancy rate was 2.2% and the rental vacancy rate was 8.6%.
The 2020 census reported a population density of 1,932.1 per square mile (746.0/km2) and 91,908 housing units at an average density of 931.0 per square mile (359.5/km2).
American Community Survey (2016–2020)
The 2016–2020 American Community Survey 5-year estimates show that the average household size was 2.2 and the average family size was 3.0, and that 23.6% of residents 25 and older had earned a bachelor's degree or higher.
The same ACS estimates place the median household income at $41,598 (± $1,071) and the median family income at $55,835 (± $1,423); males had a median income of $29,741 (± $1,153) versus $24,105 (± $1,370) for females, and the median income for those 16 years old and over was $26,589 (± $591). Approximately 15.9% of families and 22.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 30.1% of those under the age of 18 and 12.5% of those ages 65 or over.
2010 census
As of the census of 2010, the population of Knoxville was 178,874, a 2.9% increase from 2000. The median age was 32.7, with 19.1% of the population under the age of 18, and 12.6% over the age of 65. The population was 48% male and 52% female. The population density was 1,815 persons per square mile.
The racial and ethnic composition of the city was 76.1% white, 17.1% black, 0.4% Native American, 1.6% Asian, and 0.2% Pacific Islander. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.6% of the population. People reporting more than one race formed 2.5% of the population.
Data collected by the Census from 2005 to 2009 reported 83,151 households in Knoxville, with an average of 2.07 persons per household. The home ownership rate was 51%, and 74.7% of residents had been living in the same house for more than one year. The median household income was $32,609, and the per capita income was $21,528. High school graduates were 83.8% of persons 25 and older, and 28.3% had earned a bachelor's degree or higher. The city's poverty rate was 25%, compared with 16.1% in Tennessee and 15.1% nationwide.
According to the opinion of the Economic Research Institute in a 2006 study, Knoxville was identified as the most affordable U.S. city for new college graduates, based on the ratio of typical salary to cost of living.
From Wikipedia’s article on Knoxville, Tennessee, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4