His final resting place is in Arlington Cemetery. His résumé was littered with amazing accomplishments: United States Secretary of the Treasury, oversaw establishment of the Federal Reserve System, U.S. Senator from California, president of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company. He led the project to build two train tunnels under the Hudson River to connect Manhattan and New Jersey that are still used to this day.

He was William Gibbs McAdoo, native of Marietta, Georgia, who moved to Knoxville with his parents in his youth when his father became a professor at the University of Tennessee. He graduated from UT and became a lawyer, first setting up practice in Chattanooga.

By the late 1880s, McAdoo was back in Knoxville in the streetcar business with the Elmwood Street Railway Company, which used steam power instead of the horses and/or mules used during the same time by the Knoxville Street Railway. He was looking forward though, and wanted to bring electricity to the Knoxville streetcar situation. Which he did, reorganizing as the Rapid Transit Company. By the early 1890s, with the backing of a bank in Philadelphia, he’d bought out the Knoxville Street Railway and Knoxville Electric Street Railway Company was born.

Where McAdoo succeeded was in electrifying the street car service. Unfortunately, it cost exponentially more than he’d anticipated, he failed to make his bond payments, and the company went into receivership. He left in 1892 for New York City and other ventures. But he would be back, and his return brought it with a most bizarre chapter in Knoxville history.

In 1895, the assets of his former company were being sold off, and the majority were purchased by businessman Cornelius C. Howell. But McAdoo was able to reacquire a portion of his old business, now organized as the Citizens Railway Company, and was focused on connecting North Knoxville (then a separate city) to downtown. Howell was focused on the city’s extant routes but was jealous of his territory and not generous toward interlopers.

You have to keep in mind that the city’s boundary was much smaller in the 1890s than it is today. Both parties spent two years attempting to thwart the other’s progress. Things came to a head in March 1897. The short of it is, McAdoo needed to tie his street car lines from Broadway into the Southern Railway Terminal by laying tracks on Depot Street. A prior incident where he tried to build lines on Park (Magnolia) caused Howell to block his path with a street car and an armed guard ordered to shoot to kill anyone who tried to move it. Anyway, McAdoo had his workers get to work on Depot Street in October 1896, which immediately led to the arrest of said workers.

So, McAdoo got himself an injunction from the Knox County Chancery Court preventing the city from further interference. He sent 200 laborers back to Depot Street on March 1. Howell’s lookouts tipped off the Knoxville police who arrived quickly and ordered a cessation of all work. McAdoo, with numbers and a piece of paper on his side, told his workers to ignore them and press on. Soon the police arrested McAdoo and a handful of workers.

Then a crowd started to gather, eventually growing to around 2,000, which predominantly sided with Team McAdoo, mostly because folks were being harassed just trying to do their jobs. The city called in the fire department to disperse the workers and the crowds with fire hoses. One of the workers, William Arnold, attacked the fire chief with a pick. Arnold was then fatally shot by a police officer.

Knoxville Mayor Samuel Heiskell arrived on scene to try to calm things down and prevent an all-out riot. McAdoo returned and roused his workers with a speech. Then the sheriff’s office showed up and started arresting all the city officials on site, including Mayor Heiskell. By the next day, the city had its own injunction to stop any further progress by Citizens Railway.

In the end, McAdoo, disgusted, sold Citizens to Howell, who by 1898 controlled all of Knoxville’s streetcar lines under the name Knoxville Traction Company.

McAdoo returned to New York and never returned to Knoxville. His road to Secretary of the Treasury started with campaigning for President Woodrow Wilson and later marrying his daughter Eleanor (his first wife, Sarah, mother of seven of his nine children, died in 1912). McAdoo died in 1941 after attending the third inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.

Sources: The Knoxville Journal digital archives, Tennessee Encyclopedia, Library of Congress digital archives, Heart of the Valley: A History of Knoxville, Tennessee (Knoxville, Tenn.: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1976),