A holiday season just like the ones we used to know

by Jack Neely

Look around. From Dollywood to West Town, from Currier & Ives prints to dozens of current TV commercials, you see merchants of 1997 celebrating Christmas in the symbols and styles of the Victorian era—as if the Victorian Christmas was the one true kind of Christmas.

But people of Knoxville's Victorian era were already nostalgic for an "old-fashioned Christmas." In the old days, Knoxvillians of 1897 figured, it must have been a simpler, more peaceful time. Because the Knoxville of 1897 was a dirty, noisy, often terrifying place, seething with burglars, prostitutes, drunks, shoplifters, gamblers, brawlers, and a new breed of swindlers called "bunko steerers." Knoxville's "Bowery"—the bottom of First Creek along Central Avenue between the train station and the riverfront wharves—was an underworld of prostitution and addiction.

Many crimes down there went unsolved; witnesses in the Bowery were rarely cooperative. Police in 1897 were trying to prod witnesses to come forward by offering a silver half-dollar to anyone who reported a crime. Sometimes it worked. Thanks to a tip, police nabbed a notorious embezzler at Coulter's bar a couple days before Christmas. And a rash of robberies in Bearden had apparently been solved: a couple of teenage boys made a habit of stealing knives, money, and candy while the community held services at the Presbyterian Church.

But that tip fee was also breeding new crimes. The bunko steerers' favorite scam in late '97 was to locate some poor country rube who was new to town, get him drunk, lead him onto private property, and tell him to wait right there—then report the trespasser to the cops. And collect that half-dollar witness fee. Some bunko sports pulled that off at least once, at the Southern freight yards a couple days before Christmas, on some poor guy who'd walked all the way to Knoxville from another county, looking for a job.

The trouble wasn't all downtown. There'd been a Christmas-week shooting out at the Concord train station. A man named Staley was at large after shooting another named McReynolds—who had survived, for the moment. Remarkably, he was even said to be "resting reasonably well, although the ball is supposed to be yet in his head." But most of the shooting done in 1897 was on one street called Central Avenue. In the days just before Christmas, there was nearly a murder a day on the Bowery.

The police generally left the thousand little crimes of the Bowery alone. Sometimes they even left murder alone.

At 50, Julia Owens was one of the oldest prostitutes still in business on the Bowery. Her place was on Central, near the intersection of Wall. At about 7:00 on the 21st, a neighbor found her dead on her floor. As word got around that night, the curious denizens of the Bowery rushed into Julia's well-known house to have a look. When the police and reporters arrived, more than 20 men, women, and children, both black and white, were crowded there inside her parlor, just looking at her body. Clutched in her hand she held 38 cents in silver and Indian-head pennies. No cause of death was announced; and Sheriff Groner let it be known there would be no investigation.

Rush Curtain was a 22-year-old painter who also had a job in the wool mills. He still lived with his parents, but apparently liked to escape down to the Bowery when he could. He'd had a few brushes with the law, an assault only a few months ago. At about 9:00 on the night before Christmas Eve, Curtain was at Annie Motto's brothel on Central near Union, just a few doors down from the late Julia Owens' place. Before several witnesses in the parlor, Curtain began threatening a lady of the evening named Callie Leek. Motto, the 30-year-old madame, was famous for her beauty, but not necessarily her patience. She'd had plenty of Curtain. Motto drew her .38 and shot Curtain three times, hitting him in the face and neck. He fell on Motto's floor. All he had on him were a couple of paycheck envelopes and a flask of whiskey.

Arrested for attempted murder—shortly it would be plain murder—Motto's arraignment was a yuletide sensation. Citizens crowded into the courtroom just to look at her.

Before the judge, Motto "sat and faced the crowd with smiling face and shining eyes," laughed and chatted with her lawyer. It was said she "shows hardly any signs of the life she leads."

The Christmas Eve Knoxville Tribune reported it with the headline: SHOT BY A WOMAN: THE FIRST EVENT OF CHRISTMAS HAS OCCURRED. They seemed to know there'd be more trouble down there on the Bowery, even before the dawn of Christmas Day.

Christmas was a little merrier through the more comfortable neighborhoods of the city. UT and most of Knoxville's schoolkids were off until after New Year's. But West Knoxville schoolkids were behind on the year. They were told they'd get no days off for Christmas at all. Fortunately for them, Christmas Day itself was a Saturday. Most government offices, usually open on Saturdays in 1897, got the day off; postmen were told that due to the holiday, they'd have to make only one round of deliveries on the 25th.

Some Methodists were upset about an old-fashioned Christmas tradition. One well-known minister, Brother Price of Holston Methodist, thought Santa Claus a sinister influence on children. "We do not think it right to make children believe that there is a veritable Santa Claus," he declared. "If children are deceived, they will...discover the deception and will believe that their parents have lied."

The Knoxville Tribune ridiculed Price's concern, quoting at length the New York Sun's recent response to a letter from one Virginia O'Hanlon: "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus..."

Christmas Eve was cold but bracing. Despite persistent rumors of a smallpox epidemic breeding in the crevices of town, downtown shops teemed with thousands of last-minute shoppers. Some estimated that downtown shopping was the busiest it had ever been, partly because a dismal rain had kept people inside earlier in the week. Rafael "Raf" Marmora, the Italian fruitseller, was offering his bananas and oranges and figs, which were already a Christmas tradition for many. Paul Huray, the popular Market Square butcher who had been known to shape Christmas trees out of stuffed hog skins, displayed his own holiday specialty, several sausage-stuffed Christmas pigs.

The elegant Hotel Imperial at Gay and Clinch unveiled its always-anticipated Christmas Day menu. This year, their holiday dinner would include Stewed Terrapin, Maryland Style; Boiled Philadelphia Capon with Egg Sauce; Saddle of Elk; and, for dessert, Absynthe Jelly. The Hotel Flanders' offering, Holston River Salmon, could hardly compete.

Fireworks, an old-time Christmas tradition, were still on sale downtown. Here and there a kid dared to fire off a small bomb—but after the explosive Christmas melee of 1893, police crackdowns on traditional Christmas fireworks made this Christmas somewhat less deafening than those of the past. Still, according to one reporter, "the din of tin horns, the squeaky notes of toy balloons...the clang of the gongs of the passing [trolley] cars...the squealing cries of the street fakirs make a medley with which the Anvil Chorus shrinks into insignificance."

It was maybe less merry, but often just as noisy only two blocks away from Gay Street, down on the Bowery.

For reasons not recorded, the lady who kept the house on Central near Church went by the name of Big Six; Mary Smith was apparently too plain a name for a successful prostitute. Big Six shared her house—or bagnio, as it was called—with a young man named Tom Bowen. Christmas Eve found Bowen out with the guys in a Bowery bar. Bowen may have been on his way home, on the sidewalk in front of Big Six's bagnio, when he got in a fight with a drunk, a middle-class visitor named Bert Hood. Apparently because he thought Hood was taking up too much space on the sidewalk, Bowen struck at Hood with his cane and knocked him flat. As Hood was sprawled on the pavement, someone fired three shots, hitting Bowen once in the neck. The courthouse bell tolled midnight, the beginning of Christmas Day; Bowen's friends dragged him into Big Six's house and placed him in a chair. Bleeding profusely from a severed carotid artery, Bowen was breathing heavily. When a doctor finally arrived at about 1:00 a.m., all he could offer Bowen was a double shot of morphine.

Bowen was near death at about 4 a.m. when the well-dressed Catholics of nearby Irish Town appeared in the dark streets by the hundreds, making their way up the hill to Immaculate Conception, where white-robed Father Marron would conduct Midnight Mass. Parishioners didn't observe Midnight Mass at midnight, they explained, due to "the disorder frequently consequent upon parties sitting up all night...too often engaging in carousing during the evening."

Back down on the Bowery, where Bowen's blood stained the floor of Smith's bagnio, Big Six hung black crepe from her door. Christmas passers-by paused to hear her moaning within. "There appeared to be something she would not tell of the affair," concluded one witness.

Hood was arrested for the shooting, but the several witnesses told wildly different stories about what happened. "Hood is from a good family and was just out for a little fun," the Knoxville Tribune apologized.

When Hood's pistol was found loaded and apparently not recently fired, suspicion turned toward a stonecutter named Charles Kitchen who lived in a boarding house at Central and Fifth. After breakfast on Christmas Day, Kitchen vanished.

As the fancy Gay Street hotels served their sumptuous Christmas dinners, Staub's Opera House hosted some traditional Christmas Day vaudeville: the comedy team of Bates & Silvers, touring Knoxville boys playing their hometown for the first time ever, and Trixie Lewis and Faye Carlisle, the comic sopranos, "two of the winsomest little creatures to be seen anywhere." With some other thespians, they performed renditions of Peck's Bad Boy for the holiday crowd, a matinee and an evening show both.

It was none too winsome down on the Bowery, hardly a block down the hill from Staub's. There, on Christmas Day "the saloon men did a land-office business." There was a yuletide razor fight at Rose's Bar; Doak Owens' ear was split in two. At Sheridan's Row, John Newman struck Hal Adams with a piece of iron, a wound reported to require "the skill of nine doctors and 12 disciples of Blackstone" to heal. (Both men were reportedly "bloody as hogs.") And at Cook's Bar, two "Belles of the Bowery" had it out in a fight over a man who'd given one of them 50 cents for Christmas. The ladies "got in the murky way early in the day and proceeded to have an A-1 hair-pulling time of it..." (Bell Howard was later found guilty of slicing Mamie Clabbard's nose apart.)

IT WAS ROUGH ON THE BOWERY was the Tribune 's understatement about holiday festivities on Central. SEVERAL CRACKED HEADS AND CUTS.

Lots Christmas Day, as undertakers laid out Tom Bowen and made room for Rush Curtain, snow fell. "The fleecy elements bedecked the terrestrial sphere, or at least that portion known as Knoxville," reported the Journal, from the mansions of Fort Sanders to the bloodstained bagniosa« of the Bowery. By dark, all of Knoxville was under a white blanket an inch deep. It was little consolation. "Started off as a pretty day but got bad," went the weather report about the first Christmas snow since '88. "Walking was most disagreeable, and early in the night the streets were almost deserted." Unfortunately, Knoxville in 1897 had yet to develop sentimental feelings for a white Christmas.