Back in the 1970s when I was in second grade at Sterchi Elementary School, I had one of my art scribblings selected for one of the student shows at the local art gallery. This was in the days before a World’s Fair Park and the Knoxville Museum of Art as we now know it.
I still have the piece buried in a storage box somewhere, and I recall it involved an apple tree and sunshine. I remember going with my family to see the exhibit and pulling up to a grand old manse on Kingston Pike along the outer edge of Sequoyah Hills. It was the Dulin Gallery of Art. I was quite proud.
At the time of my participation, the gallery would have only been in operation about a decade. It was also the first place to host the Fantasy of Trees. The Dulin was the former home of H. L. and Eugenia Dulin at 3106 Kingston Pike. Built in 1915, it was designed by noted New York architect John Russell Pope, whose work included the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He also worked locally on Church Street United Methodist Church (where the Dulins were members).
Hanson Lee Dulin was originally from Madisonville, Kentucky, born in 1865. He married Eugenia Bell (born 1868 in Robertson County, Tennessee) in 1892. The couple moved to Knoxville in 1907 from Springfield, Tennessee, where he had operated a dry goods store and woolen mill. Dulin came here as a cofounder of the Anderson-Dulin-Varnell dry goods company that eventually bought (with Oscar Handly) the Knoxville Miller’s Department Store.
Dulin sold his Miller’s interest in 1926 and went on to co-found the Cumberland Trust bank and concentrate on other interests such as real estate, coal and mining.
He died in August of 1941, but his bride, only three years his junior, survived him another 20 years. They had only one child, a daughter, Mary Kathrine (also spelled Katherine), who married John Clifford Folger.
An Iowa native, Folger was an investment banker who served as President Dwight Eisenhower’s Ambassador to Belgium from 1957-1959. The couple (who had two sons) divided their time between D.C. (where there’s a garden in Kathrine’s honor at the Smithsonian) and Palm Beach, Florida.
So, when Eugenia Dulin died in 1961, Kathrine inherited (among other things) the Kingston Pike home. As a supporter of the arts, instead of putting it up for sale, the Folgers generously leased the property to the gallery for a single dollar a year as well as putting some financial support behind it. Knoxville finally had an art gallery/museum!
All went fairly swimmingly up until about 1980. The short of it is, big old mansions require a lot of maintenance, and it takes a lot of money to bring them up to modern standards. Plus, more room was needed to house permanent exhibits. The plans for a new location had already begun by the time things reached critical mass in 1985. The largest and most important exhibit the Dulin had ever hosted had to be ended prematurely. A show that featured works by Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt (to name just a few) could not go on with faulty climate control and unblocked sunlight.
The move was fraught with financial woes and did cause some fights and some hurt feelings, but by 1987 the name was changed to The Knoxville Museum of Art and moved into the Candy Factory at World’s Fair Park while its new location was being built just up the hill. The KMA, as we now know it, opened its doors 35 years ago on March 25. But its origins still lie a few miles west on Kingston Pike. The home is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and maintained as a private residence.
Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.
Sources: McClung digital collection-Knox County Library, Knoxville Journal digital archives, The Tennessee Encyclopedia, Knoxville Museum of Art
