Contemplating disasters on a Friday afternoon in March

by Jack Neely

It was a Tennessee March, 85 springs ago. Warm weather followed by torrential rains—two-and-a-half inches on Wednesday—then a sudden cold snap, down to 33 degrees, and snow flurries. And Knoxville was nervously watching the river. Rivermen estimated it was rising at 18 inches per hour. A dam broke up on the Watauga, and old-timers said the French Broad was higher than they'd ever seen it.

It was much worse up north. In Ohio and Kentucky, hundreds were dying in the floods of 1913, some said thousands. The papers published photos of overturned houses. In Knoxville, the wharves were flooded, already an 11-year high. Riverside warehouses had been emptied—wheat, oats, and dry goods moved onto barges and into attics. Looney Island was underwater, only treetops in the current.

But by Friday afternoon, Knoxvillians had reason for relief. The river appeared to be cresting before massive damage was done. By the end of the day, the weather was still chilly, in the upper 40s, but warming. The skies were finally clear, and Knoxville was looking forward to its first spring weekend.

No one expected what happened at 4:55 that afternoon.

A UT janitor on break crept across the L&N railroad bridge peer down at that river gauge. Nobody'd seen the water this high since 1902, and he wanted to have a good look. He lay down on the tracks, peering between the crossties. Suddenly, he said, the ties leapt up and punched him in the nose.

"You can bet I beat it to solid ground," he said. "The bridge was crazy—that's all!"

Nearby the UT baseball team was practicing. Gravelly, uneven Wait Field bordered Cumberland Avenue, part of in on a steep slope up the Hill. Home-runs often rolled back down toward the diamond. At 4:55, Coach Clevenger said it felt as if the ground dropped out from under him. One of his players seemed only disgusted, storming off the field. "This certainly is no place for a ballplayer," he said.

Grading the land for the new South Knoxville High, a heavy horse-drawn bulldozer hopped up into the air. The horses tried to escape into the woods.

At the Gay Theater near Wall was a matinee showing of From the Manger to the Cross. The famous silent movie filmed in Palestine had come to the climax, the crucifixion, when the audience, sitting in darkness, felt the building bob like a boat on a wave. Some dropped to their knees and prayed.

Many said it sounded like a massive explosion. Others said it was like a giant whip cracking in the air. Others, especially those in automobiles and streetcars, didn't notice anything at all and wondered why panicked crowds were running along the sidewalks.

Pictures fell off walls. Chimneys crumbled to the ground. Plate-glass windows broke. Clocks stopped at 4:55. On Union Avenue, the iron framework of a large street sign bent. Furniture fell over, potted plants dumped on the floor. "Kitchen and tableware danced a merry tune, and some came tumbling down." Pavement broke in North Knoxville, especially along Scott and Glenwood. Plaster fell from walls at the downtown Auditorium and at UT. A fire alarm went off at the corner of Depot and Gay.

Before radio, people had telephones. They called the newspapers. The phones at both the Journal and the Sentinel began ringing before 5:00 and didn't cease until after midnight. Reporters didn't know what to tell the callers; but when an alarmed long-distance call rang in from Jellico, they figured it could be only one thing.

On the streets, some were convinced a meteor had hit. Others figured a locomotive had exploded at the Southern station. Some said an oil tank exploded at the L&N. Some thought a gunpowder mill in Clinton had exploded. Some thought S.B. Luttrell's dynamite business in South Knoxville had gone up. One veteran said he hadn't felt anything like it since an ammunition magazine exploded during the Civil War.

Many were sure one of the new skyscrapers—the Burwell Building, or the brand-new Holston Bank Building on Gay Street, perhaps—had suddenly tumbled down. Workers rushed out of their buildings "like bees swarming from a hive." People ran out of the Burwell Building "like rats leaving a sinking ship." Many were nauseous.

The Arnstein Building shook "like a leaf in the wind." On the seventh floor of the Arnstein, 12 dignitaries were preparing the National Conservation Exposition in the fall. At 4:55, someone shouted "Get close to the walls! The building is falling in!" Quickly, 12 well-dressed Exposition officers found themselves "hugging a wall just as close as it was possible to hug."

But the Arnstein Building didn't fall in. (I know, because I'm sitting in it 85 years later, drinking a cup of tea.) One of the men in that meeting up on the seventh floor was Dr. Charles Gordon, the UT geologist. He noticed it was a distinctly vertical up-and-down motion, indicating the disturbance was directly beneath the city.

By the end of the day, everyone was convinced it was the worst earthquake in Knox-ville history—but, then, no one was old enough to remember the New Madrid quakes 101 years earlier. Wild stories made the rounds that it was nationwide. Charleston had fallen into the sea. Atlanta was swallowed whole. Manhattan was leveled. But it was strictly a Knoxville-area phenomenon. Even Chattanooga didn't notice it.

Advertising people went to work. Less than 24 hours after the quake, a Union Avenue barber ran a display ad in the Saturday Sentinel: The earthquake smashed only one thing in Knoxville, it declared: the prices at the Antiseptic Barber Shop.

Yesterday's terror was becoming today's joke. But three days later, a massive earthquake hit the Bering Sea in the North Pacific, off the coast of czarist Siberia, 4,000 miles—but hardly a quarter of a planet—from Knoxville.