by Rob Howard – KnoxvilleRob.com
Two hundred fifty years of America, and if you trace the wiring back far enough, an unreasonable amount of it runs through a town of roughly two hundred thousand people tucked into the foothills of the Smokies.
I’ve lived in and around Knoxville my whole life, and I still catch myself surprised by how often this happens. Somebody founds a movement, breaks a story, or changes a law, and if you follow the thread back, it snags on Knoxville.
Two men make the case better than anybody: one who helped write the rules of the American republic and nearly got run out of it in disgrace, and one who showed up broke, folded newspapers before sunrise, and grew up to define what honest journalism looks like. Between the two of them, and a long list of others who deserve their own paragraph, you get a pretty good snapshot of what East Tennessee does to people. It either makes you or it exposes you. Sometimes both at once.
The Senator Who Got Away With It
William Blount signed the U.S. Constitution in 1787. A few years later, President Washington sent him west to govern the brand new Southwest Territory, the raw stretch of land that would become Tennessee. Blount picked a spot on the Holston River, negotiated the Treaty of Holston with the Cherokee in 1791 to open the land for settlement, and built a house that’s still standing downtown. We call it Blount Mansion now. He chaired the convention that wrote Tennessee’s first constitution in 1796. Blount County still carries his name.
Here’s the part they leave off the historical marker. Blount had gambled hard on western land, millions of acres of it, and by the mid-1790s he was drowning in debt. In 1797, while sitting as one of Tennessee’s first two U.S. senators, he got caught trying to help the British seize Spanish Florida and Louisiana, hoping a British-controlled Mississippi would send his land values through the roof. A letter in his own hand made it to President Adams.
The Senate expelled him by a vote of 25 to 1, the first expulsion in its history, and the House opened the first impeachment proceedings against a federal official the country had ever seen. George Washington, the man who’d appointed him governor, said he hoped Blount would be held in detestation by all good men. Abigail Adams called it a diabolical plot.
Facing arrest, Blount posted bail and rode straight home to Knoxville. The town met him with a military parade.
A parade. For the guy who tried to sell out the country to protect his real estate portfolio. That’s East Tennessee loyalty for you, and I mean that as a compliment. Blount lived out his last few years as a popular member of the Tennessee state senate and never spent a day in jail.
He’s buried at First Presbyterian downtown, a few blocks from the mansion where he once ran an entire territory.
The Paperboy Who Told the Truth
A century later, a different kind of Knoxville kid was making his own mark, this one from the bottom instead of the top. Adolph Ochs’s family landed in Knoxville broke after the Civil War, his father a struggling shopkeeper who eventually declared bankruptcy.
At eleven, Adolph was delivering the Knoxville Chronicle before school. By twelve he’d worked his way up to office boy, and a couple years after that, to printer’s devil, learning the trade under an editor named William Rule who took a liking to him and never really let go.
Ochs left Knoxville at seventeen with nothing but ink under his fingernails and a stubborn idea: that a newspaper should print both sides of the story fairly, even when it was inconvenient, at a time when most papers existed to shout for one political side or the other. At twenty, he borrowed two hundred fifty dollars and bought a controlling stake in a failing Chattanooga paper, and turned it profitable within a few years. By 1896, he’d borrowed his way into ownership of the New York Times, a paper on the edge of collapse with a readership of about nine thousand.
He cut the price to a penny to outlast the sensational papers of the day, brought in an editor who insisted on getting the facts straight before getting them fast, and hung a new motto over the masthead: All the News That’s Fit to Print. Circulation climbed past three quarters of a million within a couple of decades. That line is still on the front page every single day.
He built one of the most trusted institutions in American journalism out of a work ethic he learned on Gay Street.
What I Take From These Two
I don’t know that Blount and Ochs ever crossed paths, though Knoxville was small enough in the 1870s that they easily could have. They didn’t need to. One shows you what happens when ambition outruns integrity. The other shows you what happens when a kid with nothing decides honesty is worth building a whole career on. Knoxville produced both, and honestly, that tracks. This has never been a town that does anything halfway.
The Rest of the List
Blount and Ochs are the two that stuck with me, but they’re nowhere close to the whole story. A few more worth knowing, in no particular order.
Forty years before the Civil War even started, a Quaker printer in Jonesborough named Elihu Embree published The Emancipator, the first newspaper in the country dedicated entirely to ending slavery. It didn’t last long, but it laid groundwork the rest of the nation wouldn’t catch up to for decades.
When the war did come, East Tennessee stayed stubbornly pro-Union while the rest of the state voted to secede. A Knoxville newspaper editor known as Parson Brownlow spent the war years attacking the Confederacy in print, and local Unionists coordinated a raid that burned nine railway bridges across the region in a single night, gutting Confederate supply lines from the inside.
Fast forward to 1920, and the entire fate of the 19th Amendment, women’s right to vote nationwide, came down to one deadlocked vote in the Tennessee legislature. A twenty-four-year-old representative from McMinn County named Harry Burn walked in planning to vote no, then got a letter from his mother that morning telling him to be a good boy and vote for suffrage.
He switched his vote on the floor. One East Tennessean, one letter from home, and the amendment became federal law.
Twenty miles from where I’m typing this, the federal government built Oak Ridge in near-total secrecy during World War II to enrich the uranium that ended up in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Most of the people running the machines were teenage girls straight out of East Tennessee high schools, kept completely in the dark about what they were building. They outperformed the PhDs sent to supervise them.
Around the same era, Franklin Roosevelt’s most ambitious New Deal experiment, the Tennessee Valley Authority, set up headquarters right downtown and rewired the rural South with electricity and flood control, proving the federal government could engineer a regional comeback.
A couple decades later, the Highlander Research and Education Center near Knoxville trained Rosa Parks in nonviolent resistance months before she sat down on that bus in Montgomery, and hosted strategy sessions for Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. Around the same time, a young Knoxville man named Theotis Robinson Jr. simply applied to UT, got denied because of his race, and pushed until the university integrated peacefully, without the riots that tore through other Southern campuses.
And before any of that, a group of Knoxville business leaders spent the 1920s and 30s raising money and donating land to help establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, now the most visited national park in the country, years before the rest of the nation took conservation seriously.
Why I Keep Digging Into This
I grew up thinking of Knoxville as home first and history second, if I thought about the history part at all. The longer I do this job, the more I think that’s backward. Every street I show a house on, every courthouse record I pull, every old building somebody wants to tear down, there’s usually more sitting underneath it than anybody realizes. Blount and Ochs just happen to be the two who made me stop and write it down.
If you want more of this kind of digging, it’s basically what A Knoxville Podcast has been doing since 2007. Find it, along with everything else I’m working on, at KnoxvilleRob.com.