In which we recall another magical Victorian Christmas

by Jack Neely

I felt a chill when the office door opened. A man told the secretary he wanted to leave a package for that "hidden history" guy. I left my desk to greet him, but he'd already left. All I could see was the back of a dark overcoat and a battered derby descending the stairs.

I turned to the box, which was marked in red, Open Before Christmas. I considered calling the sheriff's bomb squad, but my curiosity got the best of me. I put on my flak vest and some safety glasses, and opened the package.

Inside was one of those glass globes with the city scene and snow that would swirl around if you shook it up. But this one was different. First I noticed the snow seemed a little on the sooty side. Then I noticed the city, which seemed especially strange. It was definitely a Victorian scene, as Christmas scenes always are, lots of arched windows and peaked roofs. But I couldn't help noticing that something about this city seemed a little—well, scruffy.

I looked closely at a miniature city that looked unexpectedly familiar. An old churchyard. An arched steel bridge that looked brand new. A three-story courthouse with a clock tower. And down in those streets were tiny people. On the sidewalks, in the streets, black people, white people, horses and carriages and bicycles.

I got out my magnifying glass and looked more closely, so closely I could almost see their faces. Since then I've been preoccupied with them, the people who lived in Knoxville in 1898, at Christmastime.

After cold weather which had stranded steamboats in ice on the French Broad, we had a warming spell just before Christmas. Knoxville looked different than last year. Now there was a huge new market building on old Market Square and, finally, a modern steel bridge over the river at Gay Street.

Thousands of people in the streets, sometimes overflowing the sidewalks into the pavement, getting in the way of the streetcars, men in derbies and hombergs, women in bonnets and that odd new topknot hairdo.

A small minority carried bags full of shiny metal sticks. See, the big new thing in Knoxville in 1898 was something called golf. Introduced that summer, when "a Knoxville boy brought to this city some clubs and balls of strange appearance," it got around during that fall. By December, the Knoxville Journal reported, "the fever has spread, and now every week quite a number of ladies and gentlemen may be seen armed with clubs...."

Working-class guys made up the original Knoxville Golf Club of 1898: a grocer, a hotel clerk, a quarryman, a patent-medicine man, and one identified only as "an Ohio Democrat." They called themselves the Knights of the Mid-Iron. Those pioneer duffers had actually prepared a golf course: a nine-hole course on the west end of Fort Sanders, along what would later be Tyson Park and Third Creek—golfers called it "the Styx."

Each of the nine holes already had a nickname. Number five, "the Cinch," was the easiest. The toughest may have been number six, "the Corner," known for its own particular hazard—the fairway crossed the Southern railroad tracks.

The economy was good, and downtown stores were doing record business. Some were marketing the Christmas of '98 as the Doll Christmas. Max Arnstein's Gay Street store claimed to be selling 1,000 dolls a week. Just down the sidewalk, Newcomer's advertised 10,000 dolls on hand, all sorts: washable, jointed, moving eyes, even "special Big Fat Baby Kid Dolls."

Parlor games were also the rage. There were dozens to choose from: Old Maid, Authors, Backgammon, Tiddly Winks, Fascination, Go Bang, Lotto, Parcheesi, Bezique, and a new board game based on the career of world adventurer Nellie Bly. Woodruff's Hardware was cashing in on the bodybuilding craze with punching bags, dumbbells, and exercise machines.

It was a profitable Christmas all around, for merchants and for thugs. Shoplifting was epidemic. Purse-snatchers, most of them juveniles, like the notorious "Baby" Child, roamed the sidewalks. Drunks got in painful scrapes down in the Bowery. Yuletide crime was a Knoxville tradition; sometimes there'd been a murder a day during the Christmas break, especially in or around the 100-odd saloons downtown. But in 1898, there was a special dread of a different sort of criminal: they were known by the innocuous-sounding name footpads. Sometimes romantic reporters called them highwaymen. We would call them muggers. By any name, robbers struck a dozen times in Knoxville in the week before Christmas. Some carried revolvers, clubs, butcher knives. They rarely left their victims unscathed.

They struck mostly in the quiet new residential areas away from the lights of downtown. Morris Cohen was a merchant who lived on Crooked Street, downtown, but the weekend before Christmas was out walking on Chamberlain, in the northwest side of town near the Knoxville Brewery. Two men pounced on him, hit him in the head, and took the $15 he was carrying.

The same night, James Comfort was walking along Bell Avenue within sight of his home when three men jumped him, one bearing a shiny revolver that reflected the lights of the houses; they stole Comfort's money and a gold watch. A couple of nights later, James Lonas, of Middlebrook, was robbed of his coat, vest, and $1.15 in cash, also on Bell Avenue. Charles Ducloux was attacked by two gunmen on 5th. Five robbers even stopped a wagon of armed farmers headed home on Broadway to Union County; slicing at the farmers with a butcher knife, they made away with $12.

On the night after the Cohen mugging, Policeman Ed Conner was trolling for footpads near the Brewery. Conner was on his way back downtown after midnight, when he encountered a man in a hurry; trying to find a doctor, he said. He told Conner that a man had been shot in Mechanicsville. Conner ran back to that quiet neighborhood; there, bleeding from two serious gunshot wounds to the chest, was his own brother, Felix.

Felix Conner was barkeep at the Rocky Turner Saloon, across from the Brewery. A quiet, easygoing sort, Felix Conner had encountered a closing-time patron who had arrived at the saloon "beastly drunk." Just after midnight, Conner had half-carried James Millett to the man's Mechanicsville home. As they arrived, Millett turned and, for no apparent reason, shot Conner. When Patrolman Conner found his brother, he was lying in front of Millett's house.

When patrolmen Conner and Sterchi arrested him, Millett claimed to have no memory of the incident. Doctors tending Conner at a neighbor's house believed the wounded man to be dying. They'd been unable to locate the bullets by hand. However, they brought X-ray plates to the house and did a quick reading. The wounds were nasty, but the bullets weren't lodged in any vital organs. They announced Conner might even survive.

Uptown proper was quiet except for street kids' mischief. Market Square farmers complained that a gang of 20 delinquents played hide-and-go-seek among the market stalls every day, often helping themselves to produce. Firecrackers had been officially illegal in the city for years, but firecrackers and "cannon crackers" which had been known to remove limbs, went off all over downtown. Knoxville physicians made a formal complaint: "The firing of crackers and other explosions," they stated knowledgeably, "is very annoying to the sick."

Unable to catch the kids themselves, officers tried to crack down on their suppliers. Lt. Goolsbe, one of Knoxville's finest, had collared a suspect in the Lonas holdup, as well as the highwayman who had attacked Big Sam, the beerwagon driver. Goolsbe wasn't going to let these kids get the best of him. He happened to be patrolling on Gay, near Wall, when four intrepid kids blew up one of those cannon crackers in the street. Goolsbe, maybe the fastest sprinter on the force, took off after the teenagers; he caught all four of them two blocks away. He hauled them before Recorder C.C. Nelson, still holding court after 8:00 on a Friday night, He fined the kids, none of them over 16, and demanded to know where they got the firecrackers. "Kern's," replied the smallest one.

Peter Kern, the German baker whose elaborate store at Market Square and Union had long been a center for Christmas festivities, had sold Christmas firecrackers back when they were legal. Kern was called to appear before the judge on Christmas Eve. It was an awkward situation. At 63, Kern was one of the city's most-respected citizens. Just six years ago, Peter Kern had been mayor of Knoxville.

In room 32 of the Palace Hotel, a 60-year-old Union veteran from Boston had given up on saloons, but not on drinking. Now he brought his bottles home with him. Captain Tobin knew he had a drinking problem, but nobody knew just how sick he was.

[To be continued....]