An English doctor's first tour of the Old Country

by Jack Neely

I'd driven by and around the Tennessee School for the Deaf for years, admired the old white brick building on the top of the hill in the old Island Home neighborhood—but had never been past the guardhouse on the actual grounds. Last week, an invitation to see the school and the old house on the hill was part of why I skipped a staff meeting and took a deadline-day morning off.

The company, which sounded fascinating, was at least as big a temptation as the house. One member of the party was TSD's superintendent, Alan Mealka, the one who lives in that old house on the hill. One was E. Conley Akins, the aged historian of TSD, the one who knows more about that house on the hill than anyone alive—he knows about the place because he was a deaf student here, himself, when the school moved to this place in 1924. And the one member of the party who was new to town was Dr. Dickinson Cowan, a gynecologist, well known as a specialist in in-vitro fertilization.

Dr. Cowan is an Englishman. He grew up in Surrey and lives in Cambridge. He speaks like an Englishman, carries himself like an Englishman, spells the name Perez with the letter zed. He was here Friday because his ancestors were Knoxvillians, and one of them built this house in 1846. Dr. Cowan has become fascinated with Tennessee history without ever having seen Tennessee and has learned Knoxville history more thoroughly than most Knoxvillians know it.

The Dickinson in his name is the same Dickinson in Dickinson's Island, where Island Home Airport is; the same Dickinson in the name Perez Dickinson, the Knoxville business tycoon and philanthropist who named Island Home because he built the house on the hill above the island; and the same Dickinson in the name of Emily Dickinson, the poet.

Inside the house, hanging on a wall in the foyer, is a large framed portrait of Emily's first cousin, once removed, Perez—a man of gravity, a grey-haired Victorian in a high collar. On the cardboard back, is some historical background about the house and its builder. And, about two-thirds of the way down, the statement, Emily Dickinson wrote some of her poetry in this house.

Here on TSD's campus, the story that Emily Dickinson visited here is a matter of faith, hand-signed from generation to generation. That inscription has been there for years. No one seems to recall who wrote it. But the handwriting, in what looks like magic marker on corrugated cardboard, is in a modern, rounded style—some of the i's are even dotted with small circles. It's clearly not written by someone who knew from memory.

Literary historians doubt that Emily ever strayed this far from home. There's no mention of it in contemporary letters. Still, the legend is an old one. Mr. Akin, TSD's historian, recalls first hearing the Emily Dickinson legend in 1924 as the school was moving to its present campus.

Here's what we do know. Amherst-born Perez Dickinson came to Knoxville at 17 with a couple of sisters, one year before their cousin Emily was born. One sister married James Hervey Cowan, a successful merchant who ran a store on Gay Street. They named one of their sons Perez Dickinson Cowan.

Early in the Civil War, Uncle Perez was arrested as a Union sympathizer; it was a matter of some indignation back in Massachusetts "that he should endure such treatment when he has always been so ready to uphold their 'peculiar tradition,'" presumably slavery. (His old neighbors apparently assumed Perez owned 200 slaves just so he'd fit in here.) In spite of his status as a slaveholder. The Dickinsons and Cowans eventually fled to ride out the war in Perez's childhood home, Amherst, Massachusetts, where Emily lived.

Among them was Perez Dickinson Cowan, a rare 20-year-old who hadn't enlisted on either side. Emily grew especially fond of her Knoxville-raised cousin, whom she called "Peter." He surprised Massachusetts folks; most southern boys were "wild asses who were always ready to strike out in some unexpected direction," an acquaintance there recalled—but Cowan was "more like a girl than a boy, a paragon of refinement, demeanor, morality, and religious devotion."

This Knoxvillian bound for the ministry was sometimes left in charge of the Dickinson household when Emily's father was out of town. Cowan graduated from Amherst himself in 1866, then came back to Tennessee, a frocked Presbyterian minister based in Jonesborough, editing a religious magazine published in Knoxville. He and his cousin Emily maintained a poetic correspondence. The death of his 3-year-old daughter, Margie McClung Cowan, compelled Emily to write, "It may have been she came to show you Immortality. Her startling little flight would imply she did." Cowan remained here until 1879, when a church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, drafted him.

Emily died in 1886, having rarely left the house where she was born. Some insist flatly that it's impossible for her ever to have been here.

But it's tough to prove a negative. The train trip would have taken about a day each way. The Dickinsons and Cowans were wealthy; who's to say they couldn't have slipped cousin Emily down for a weekend at cousin Perez's guest house?

Again, there's no evidence. But the fact that the story's so old offers at least a moment's pause. See, in 1924, when Mr. Akin recalls hearing it, few would have recognized Emily Dickinson's name. Teachers didn't assign her work; more than half of her poems remained unpublished. Her reputation as one of America's greatest poets wasn't solid until years later. Why would people make up a story about her? Few knew enough to care.

After Emily died, her sister burned many of her papers. However, Dr. Cowan says his ancestor Perez Dickinson Cowan's diary, intact but still unavailable to scholars, may hold more secrets about Emily.

Perez Cowan's strain of the family settled up north. But Dr. Dickinson Cowan is English. He is, at least, until Americans in New York or elsewhere make a remark like, "That's a cute accent you have. Where are you from?"

In those cases, Dr. Cowan's favorite response is "New Jersey." That's where he was born, in the 1940s, before his family moved to England.

Dr. Cowan proved his genealogy well enough to get his First Families of Tennessee certificate. It hangs in his bathroom at home in Cambridge. But he never saw Tennessee until last Thursday. Only recently has this gynecologist discovered genealogy. He intends to write a book about his Knoxville ancestors. Walking around the old Presbyterian churchyard downtown, he recognizes several ancestors. They might even recognize him. Balding, with heavy eyebrows, Dr. Cowan is a sturdy man, but he bears a passing resemblance to his great-grandfather, the slight, studious boy who left Knoxville during the Civil War.

"That's the dilemma of us international people," he says. "We don't have roots, but we're always looking for them." He's found some of them here.