Many present-day Knox Countians assume the Fountain Head Railway (The Dummy Line) (1895-1905) used a site in downtown Knoxville as its home station. Not so, the home station was at …
Homer B. Clonts: WWII vet and columnist made Fountain City home
Homer B. Clonts joined the Navy in 1943 and served from 1943 to 1945. He was on three ships as a Navy signalman, serving longest on the staff of Adm. …
William Warren Nichols: Fountain City WWII hero
William Warren Nichols was born on Oct. 8, 1917, the only child of Clyde L. Nichols (1894-1939) and Lela Carpenter Nichols (1897-1977). Warren (as his classmates knew him) lived at …
Baum’s Greenhouse set the standard in Smithwood
In 1846, the widowed Katherine Schneider Baum and her 15-year-old son Karl (1831-1916) left their native country during the German Revolution and immigrated to America on the sailing ship New …
Claude C. Myers left mark on Fountain City
The evening paper carried this headline on Thursday, Nov. 13, 1941: “Fire Changes Busy Block to Mass of Debris.” Fountain City Bank was in that block and its president, J. …
Nannie Lee Hicks: Fountain City historian
Finally, after years of searching, the genesis of Nannie Lee Hicks’ work has been uncovered in the files of the C.M. McClung Historical Collection in a photograph and its caption …
Exploring the Elm Grove Cemetery
Some eight or 10 four-drawer file cabinets at the McClung Historical Collection contain many precious so-called “vertical files” with newspaper clippings and other documents assembled under Librarian/Archivist Ted Baehr’s careful …
Cedarcroft: Lucy Templeton’s muse shaped ‘A Country Calendar’
For more than 50 of her 57 years at the Knoxville News Sentinel, Lucy Curtis Templeton penned her column, “The Country Calendar.” The column was mostly about the birds and …