The fable of one traveler's unexpected layover

by Jack Neely

He must have seemed out of place here

that September, and not just because he had a limp. In wartime Knoxville, lots of men had limps. And not because he had a German accent; there were plenty of Germans hereabouts. He seemed out of place here because this young man was wearing the uniform of a Confederate private. Since Burnside's occupation, Union soldiers were everywhere, posted up and down Gay Street, at the courthouse, on Market Square. In September 1863, Knoxville was an embarrassing place for any lone Confederate private to be.

He was just passing through, a 27-year-old Georgian on his way to Virginia. He didn't really expect to spend his next 44 years here.

Peter Kern had grown up worlds away, in the castled village of Zwingenberg, in the Duchy of Hesse, just up the Neckar from Heidelberg. Raised to be a cobbler, Kern was a teenager during the revolutions that changed everything.

He sailed for New York when he was just 16, and found good work cobbling but hated his first New York winter. He went south to Charleston for a change of climate, but came down with yellow fever, an exotic tropical disease no good German should have to contend with. He fled north again and lived for a while in Philadelphia. Still drawn south, he roamed from Savannah to Tallahassee to Thomaston, Georgia, where he almost settled. As if to make his Southernness stick this time, in June 1861, he joined the Confederate army, a 25-year-old German private in the 12th Georgia Infantry.

His regiment was one of several commanded by Stonewall Jackson, who in early '62 was commencing his ambitious Valley campaign. That May, the 12th helped take a hill near McDowell, Virginia, and for their troubles were heavily shelled by the Union artillery. The Georgia boys caught the worst of it: Three-quarters of their regiment were killed or wounded, a greater loss than the Union army suffered in the same fight. But because the Federals retreated, Jackson marked it a rebel victory.

Among those who fell on Setlington Hill that day was Private Kern, his leg badly wounded. Kern was sent home to Georgia for a long convalescence.

By the summer of '63, when Private Kern was feeling better, it was a different war. Lee had lost at Gettysburg, Grant and Sherman were cutting up the South, and the great Stonewall Jackson was dead. It was likely with some trepidation that Kern, two years wiser, set out to return to the War. He stopped here for a few days, halfway to the Front, looking for the next ride north.

He was startled to find the Confederates gone--and, suddenly, General Burnside and several thousand blue-jacketed Federals marching all over town. Arrested, Kern spent some time here as a POW and was here during the massive Confederate assault that November. Even after he was paroled, Private Kern wasn't allowed to leave town. He decided to make the best of it and got a job with a local bootmaker.

Toward the end of the war, Kern teamed up with another German, William Heidel, to open up a new business: a bakery. He took a liking to Heidel's sister-in-law, Henrietta, and a few months into his involuntary stay here, Kern married her.

Kern bought out his friend Heidel, and the bakery became an enormous success. He and Henrietta had 10 kids; Kern must have figured by then he was as Knoxvillian as anybody. As Kern turned 40, he built a thick-walled brick building at Knoxville's most popular spot, Market Square. You could buy bread and confections there, but with two floors of busy public space and huge pennants flying from the roof, it became something more than a bakery.

Ice Cream Saloon somehow doesn't do justice to it, either, but that's what Kern's second floor was called. With polished wood and variegated marble, paintings and engravings hanging high on the wall, and cut-glass chandeliers whose "brilliant jets of light reflect every color of the rainbow," Peter Kern's was an extravagant café, a democratic palace where common people could enjoy exotic desserts, tropical soft drinks, art, and city life.

"Around white marble tables scattered all over the great hall youth and beauty meet," goes one of many extravagant descriptions of Kern's establishment from the 1890s. "It has been said that Cupid has done more effective work within this enclosure than any other place in the land."

By then, when Kern had a reputation comparable to Willie Wonka's, the German with the walrus mustache was elected mayor of this city where he'd settled because he was once stuck here. He would be the last of several immigrant mayors of Knoxville.

After Kern died, his family sold the bakery, which kept its founder's name but moved to South Knoxville, where it remains.

This is where I'm supposed to tell you when Kern's Hessian palace was demolished and what modernist outrage is there now. The old Kern building did suffer a few hard pawnshop years, was covered up and called "the Mall Building" for a while. But Peter Kern's original bakery/ice cream palace is still there, well-restored, at its southwest corner of Market Square. "Within this enclosure" is now the Soup Kitchen, for the last 15 years or so one of a few downtown restaurants that bake their own bread.

And this month opens the St. Oliver, Kristopher Kendrick's new 28-room luxury hotel, with extravagant beds, a quiet library, and, everywhere, pictures of old Knoxville. The chandeliers and marble work are long gone, but youth and beauty may still have some more meeting to do here, across Kern's still-elegant upper floors, where Cupid did his work so effectively one century ago.