What they found, 95 years ago this week
by Jack Neely
It may not have seemed the best name for a dry-goods company. Swindoll & Co. might have sounded almost like the punchline of a slapstick joke down in a cheap vaudeville routine over at Staub's. But Augustus Swindoll was proud enough of his name to put it up on his store.
He sold lots of things, clothing mostly, especially hosiery and shoes. His old partner, Richard Beard, and he used to be over on Vine, but two or three years ago they moved up in the world, to Wall Avenue, right near Market Square.
This block of Wall was crowded with two and three-story buildings, most of them Reconstruction era. Wagons and even a few new automobiles parked on this bricklined street of tailors, bootblacks, tobacconists, even some dentists and physicians. Their signs hung over the sidewalk. Market Square was booming, and it likely seemed an ideal spot for an Edwardian clothing store. Mr. Beard and Mr. Swindoll moved here, around 1901. One of John Ashe's saloon's was still here, down the block near Gay, but this block had a better reputation than it used to have, back in the '80s. These proprietors didn't know that you never really escape history.
Times were good, in spite of a bizarre election scandal; the Journal was accusing a "Ring" of Democrats—chief of them Col. Lawrence Tyson himself—of colluding to fix the election that week. The daily Sentinel was allegedly the Ring's mouthpiece.
Anyway, in the summer of 1904, about the time Mr. Beard retired, Swindoll decided business was good enough to expand his store. He hired some laborers to dig a foundation for an addition out back, in the alley between here and Commerce Street. It would be a pretty good-sized addition for a small company, 50 feet by 25, two stories out back. The idea was to dig an eight-foot-deep foundation, which seemed simple enough.
A few feet down, the workers were overcome by a stench coming from the earth. They insisted on digging slowly.
The first day of August was a Monday, and typically warm, up in the 80s. The workers were about shoulder deep when their shovels turned up a long bone—a human thighbone, as it turned out.
Over the next couple of days, digging slowly, the diggers unearthed several more bones, mostly from a couple of legs, and a pair of shoes. They weren't new shoes; they were ankle-length gaiters, of a style too old-fashioned for Swindoll's display shelves.
The workers dug some more. They didn't find a skull. What they did find was a nice felt hat. It was full of straight, sandy-colored hair. The clothes, bones, and hair all belonged to a man, the authorities agreed, and one "rather above the ordinary in height and size."
Investigators guessed the body might have been there for 20 years. Some recalled that this building had been a whorehouse, back in the days when this was the east end of Asylum Avenue. Back then, before the sewage system was completed, there'd been an outhouse behind it.
The Journal called the find "Evidence of Foul Murder in Days Past." But it was still just a job for Swindoll's contractors, not the police, and the workmen weren't in any big hurry to get every bit of the unknown man out of the hole. See, it smelled bad. "The odor of the pit is of such a nature that the workmen remove it only by degrees."
If the police weren't overly interested in the find, it was because their cabinets were full of missing persons reports, far too many to expect they could pin this one down. They were also too harried by murders last weekend to worry about one 20 years ago. Even the heated election provoked new cases. While workers were digging behind Swindoll's, just a block away at the Custom House a 53-year-old Republican farmer stabbed Charles Gurley, a Democratic nominee for road commissioner, and fled.
It wasn't the first time construction workers had found human remains in downtown Knoxville, anyway. It wasn't the second or third time, either. It fact, it wasn't all that unusual to find a skeleton or two in the dirt. This one just made for a passing curiosity in the back pages of the Journal.
The Sentinel, which prided itself on its financial coverage, didn't even cover the discovery except to make an obscure editorial-page joke of it: "The skeleton that has been unearthed on Knoxville's Wall Street recently is pronounced by scientists to have no relation whatever with the octopus of skeletons that are said to infest the only great and original Wall Street that is located in New York."
The Journal wrapped up its coverage with a shrug. "It is believed that there are parts of the skeleton yet remaining," it reported. "It is exceedingly doubtful if anything will ever be found that will ever result in divulging the identity of him who, there is every evidence to believe, has been murdered and whose body was secreted and left to decay."
If finding a dead man under your business isn't bad luck, it's not good luck, either. Swindoll didn't enjoy his addition for long; four or five years later he went out of business at 315 Wall Avenue. He did okay for himself, though. He eventually got a job as an accountant for Hall & Donahue's Coffin Co. He and his wife later moved to Sequoyah Hills.
Nothing else ever lasted long back at 315 Wall Avenue; Swindoll's old place became a hat store, then a hat shop, then a wallpaper store, then a meat market, before it was torn down.
Today the site of Swindoll & Co. is part of TVA's front yard. Some ornamental bushes and a couple of good-sized Japanese sawtooth oaks grow there, surrounded by lush grass. It's a nice place to sit and eat a sandwich on an August afternoon.
| 
