The day Knoxville's gilded age derailed

by Jack Neely

Knoxville is rapidly becoming one of the most progressive cities in the nation." When you said that in 1889, no one argued. The evidence was everywhere.

Knoxville already had dozens of factories in town, a public library, an opera house, a growing university led by a president who had a progressive reputation nationwide. Knoxville baseball games were drawing big-city crowds, in excess of 7,000. Now there was even talk of "rapid transit." You hardly needed to look any further than Mr. McAdoo's new electric trolley system, due to be completed in a few months.

All that seemed background compared to what Alexander Arthur was doing. A Scot in his 40s, he was a well-known figure at the Opera House in 1889, always in formal tuxedo, with a luxuriant mustache-and-sideburn combination like General Burnside's. Arthur had moved here only a few years ago as an executive in a Scottish-owned lumber company, and was such an impressive leader that not long after his arrival here he became president of Knoxville's Chamber of Commerce. He was known for throwing grand parties at his mansion on West Hill and for proposing grand schemes.

Arthur was convinced that this region held the key to the future of world industry. Through his American Company Limited in London, he raised tens of millions for grand projects to exploit the iron and coal reserves in the Southern Appalachians. Frustrated by Knoxville's skepticism about his schemes, he bought 50,000 acres to found his own city: Middlesborough (his spelling), Kentucky. There he planned a great industrial city that might overshadow Knoxville.

Anxious for a railroad through the Gap—which would give Knoxville a much more direct link to Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and the rest of the industrial Midwest—Knoxville promised to help. Crews went to work digging tunnels, building bridges, laying tracks. Too hastily, some later observed.

"The date fixed for the completion of the road will not be postponed," the builders announced. Crews were working through the nights to be sure it was ready for the maiden voyage.

"It will be a great day for Knoxville," reported the Tribune. "The good which will result cannot be calculated.... The city is rapidly becoming the great railroad center of the South."

On Thursday, Aug. 22, about 50 well-dressed men gathered at a train terminal so new there wasn't even a station there yet. It was in the Second Creek valley on the west side of downtown, between the mouth of the Creek and College Hill. There began the new tracks that led all the way through the Cumberland Gap and beyond.

"None but these specially invited guests will be taken," the newspaper warned.

They climbed into passenger cars so formal they had chandeliers hanging from the ceilings. Both white and black, the well-dressed guests spoke in several different accents: urban, rural, southern, northern, English, German. After a formal dinner in their honor at Cumberland Gap, they'd spend an hour or two touring the place, and get back about dark.

Both passenger cars were chock-full of dignitaries. Among those in the first car were former Mayor James Luttrell and sometime Alderman William Yardley, the black lawyer and popular orator.

In the second car was W.W. Woodruff, the hardware magnate; Rudolph Schmid, the barber so successful he was in the process of building his own building on Gay Street; Peter Kern, the German businessman whose bakery and ice cream saloon was the most popular meeting place in town; Casper Aebli, the Swiss-born tailor; attorney Charles Seymour; Sentinel editor John Hearn; Capt. H.H. Taylor, clerk of the U.S. District Court; Isaac Barry, the confectioner; Dr. Thomas West, the city physician; H.B. Wetzell, the industrialist; General Schubert, the hotelier; and the host, Alexander Arthur himself.

There were others we'd recall especially well in days to come. Frank Hockenjos was a 48-year-old German immigrant from Baden-Baden who'd opened a successful cigar plant several years back; a popular personality, he'd held a seat on City Council that was considered unbeatable.

Col. Isham Young—from Roane County, he'd been a Union lieutenant-colonel in the Civil War; people described him as "a great-bodied, big-souled man." He'd been the first chairman of the Board of Public Works and one of progressive Knoxville's most enthusiastic boosters.

Col. Silas T. Powers was from Virginia, president of the East Tennessee Insurance Company and head of Powers, Little, McCormick clothing store.

Alexander Reeder, twice-elected sheriff of Knox County, he'd been a state legislator in the 1870s.

Judge George Andrews was 62; born in Vermont, he'd spent most of his youth in Michigan, an attorney in Detroit before moving to Knoxville. Gov. Brownlow had appointed him to the state Supreme Court in '68; later, President Grant named him district attorney for East Tennessee.

They were all men whose names Knoxvillians were used to seeing in the newspaper. The names of all the men in this car would be in the paper the very next day, in fact, in big, black letters.

The train was only 23 miles out of Knoxville, approaching the third trestle over Flat Creek, when the rear car derailed. As the engine proceeded, the second passenger car broke free and tumbled down the hill, rolling over at least once, then landing upside-down in the creek.

As the engine ground to a halt, the well-dressed dignitaries in the intact first car dashed down the hill to aid the injured. The first to reach the car was Finley Patterson, editor of the Negro World. He climbed in a window to see a bizarre spectacle. "From the faces of the wounded blood flowed and ran in pools" on what had been the ceiling that bore the chandeliers. "The seats now hung above them like ungainly and horrid stalactites."

Only one man riding in the car wasn't painfully injured. F.W. Vaughn somehow managed to hang onto his seat handles, even as the car rolled upside-down.

Survivors loaded the injured back onto the train. On the way back, former Sheriff Reeder and Judge Andrews died. As the train bearing the dead and dying arrived in Knoxville, a few hours before the return trip was expected, a late-afternoon cloudburst rocked the city. Lightning danced along the telegraph wires and shocked some people using telephones downtown.

Col. Young died soon after they unloaded him. Alderman Hockenjos died two days later. A flagman, Ed Baker, died a few days after that.

For weeks, Knoxvillians watched the papers to read status reports on each of the 20 injured men; by some accounts, nine passengers eventually died as the result of what they'd call the "Flat Creek Horror."

As for Arthur, he recovered from an injured back and went back to work, building the enormous Four Seasons Hotel near Middlesborough. An extravagant, million-dollar place staffed with English servants, the Four Seasons attracted British royalty, like the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and not a few high-living Knoxvillians. But it, and Mr. Arthur's career, collided with the depression of 1893. Arthur sold the place for 2 percent of what he paid for it, only to see it torn down soon afterward.

He spent investors' millions prospecting for gold in the Klondike, but eventually dragged himself back to Middlesborough, where he died in 1912. His Boston-bred widow moved back to Knoxville, into a hotel on West Hill, and spent the rest of her life about two blocks from the grand old place where she and her husband had entertained so lavishly back in the optimistic '80s.