Unsolved Christmas mysteries of 1899
by Jack Neely
The Christmas holidays have been attended with the usual number of horrors," assessed the Journal & Tribune, after it was all over.
They weren't talking about the crowds that swamped Gay Street and Market Square, though Christmas '99 promised to be the biggest retail bonanza in Knoxville history. They weren't talking about the shoplifters and pickpockets that had been working the sidewalks since Thanksgiving. Like "Babe" Chiles, the famous 14-year-old thief arrested after the Christmas season last year. He spent most of 1899 at Brushy Mountain. He'd been out for only a few days when police recognized him on the sidewalk carrying a lady's umbrella and wearing a brand-new pair of shoes, confirmed their suspicions, and sent the Babe back to jail.
Downtown could be overwhelming in 1899, but the great thing about Knoxville was that when it got to you, you could always put your boat in the river and get away from it all.
William Lowery and his son Thomas lived on Hannah Avenue, a working-class neighborhood near downtown, but on Sunday they got out in their yawl to visit friends downriver. They were returning in their yawl in the early afternoon when, just below the university, they spotted something floating on the water. Rowing over to it, they found it to be the well-groomed head of a man. The rest of his body hung beneath.
The Lowerys rowed over to a shack on the shore where a black man loaned them a rope. They tied the rope around the body, which had been standing almost upright just below the surface of the water, and towed it to shore. Though his face was discolored, it appeared to be a young white man, well-dressed in new clothes.
Then they sailed upstream to town, where they found a telephone and called the Knoxville police.
Police Chief Columbus Reeder and his men came and picked up the dead man in a wagon. He was dressed, they remarked, as if he were going somewhere; he looked like he'd just been to the barber. But searching the body, they found nothing but four handkerchiefs. That was all. No identification, no money.
Doctors Robert Oppenheimer and Henry Kelso, professor of anatomy at the medical college, viewed the body and noted the neck was broken and his head was bruised. He'd been dead for at least three days, they said, but not much more than a week. Inside his chest, they found the lungs intact and surprisingly dry. The unknown man, they concluded, was dead before he was in the water. He'd apparently been hit in the face with such force that it broke his neck.
About 1,000 Knoxvillians filed past the body; one thought he looked familiar, a man who'd lived in Maggie Harmon's boarding house at Central and Fifth.
They buried him in Potter's Field, on the east side of town. A little too soon, it turned out. He was hardly in the ground before several railroad men mentioned they had an idea about who it was, and wanted to have a look. They dug him back up. Six of the eight Southern engineers and firemen who looked at the body identified it positively as their colleague Robert "Deck" Dunn.
Originally from Georgia, Dunn had been working as a locomotive fireman for Southern for the last few months. Nobody'd seen him since late November, just after he'd gotten his last railroad paycheck.
The last time anyone saw him, they said, Dunn was at the railroad saloon, drunk and angry. He'd had over $100 earlier in the day, but it was all gone. His friends figured he'd lost it gambling somewhere down on the Bowery.
When they were done, they gave him a proper Catholic reburial at Calvary, next door to Potter's Field.
Deck Dunn wasn't the only young man in serious straights that December. Sydney Fielden was just 19, still lived with his middle-class parents on old Park Avenue. Syd had been complaining for several days that he was broke, but he had a much more serious problem than that. He was in love with a prostitute; moreover, he was in love with a prostitute who didn't love him.
Syd's favorite places were down on Central, in the Bowery. But on Friday morning, as they were digging up Deck Dunn, Syd Fielden pawned his coat and vest and visited his lover, Birdie McDonald, one last time. And one last time, she'd refused to leave Knoxville with him. He told her she'd never see him again.
Then he went up to a higher-class joint than he was used to, the House of Lords, on Gay Street. It was an elaborate place on the west side of the 400 block, near Union, about where Mr. Miller would build his department store in a few more years. The House of Lords had a big bar in front and private, lockable "wine rooms" in the back. Van Elliot, a saloonkeeper at another joint around the corner, was drinking whiskey at the bar, and invited Syd to join him. He had one drink with Elliot, then borrowed a pencil and went back to one of those private wine rooms.
Luther Wright, the proprietor, noticed the young man was still there at midnight; he decided to let him sleep. The next morning, though, they weren't able to rouse him. When they suspected he was dead, they called the police.
The young man lay as if sleeping. With him was a note written in the pencil he had borrowed. "Take me to the undertaker, E.B. Mann. Have all my friends to come and see me...all of them know what I died for—it was for love. Give all my friends my regards and don't tell where I did it....I would rather die than leave my only loved one, for death is only a dream. Well, as it is getting dark, I will have to close....I left $86 here for my funeral expense."
But there was no $86 in the wine room. There was no money in there except for one Indian-head penny, lying beside him on the floor. Doctors said Fielden appeared to have been poisoned.
It seemed an open-and-shut case of suicide, but after deliberating for two days, the jury left the matter open. The autopsy didn't turn up arsenic or any of the usual toxins. He did have some morphine in him, but not an obviously big overdose. Investigators were further puzzled that there were no poison containers in the room. The speculation was that Fielden had overdosed before he ever set foot inside the House of Lords. Some thought it accidental, and that Syd wrote the note, and imagined the $86, in a morphine-induced delirium.
"In both cases there is an element of mystery which the coroner's juries failed to unravel," pondered the Journal & Tribune. To many Knoxvillians, the mysteries of Dunn and Fielden weighed more heavily than the Dickensian mysteries of the season.
By contrast, Christmas Day was sunny and straightforward. The morning paper carried a front-page photograph of a baby-faced 25-year-old English soldier named Winston Churchill, a celebrity because he'd just escaped from the Boers.
Knoxville celebrated Christmas the old-fashioned way, with a major municipal bowling tournament that day out at Chilhowee Park. Of course, there were the usual Christmas-Day fireworks, though they'd been banned downtown for years. That afternoon, a firecracker blew apart one Gay Street reveler's right hand. Another thrown Christmas cracker landed on top of a streetcar at Gay and Clinch, ripping a foot-long hole in its roof. (While admitting that the bomb could have killed a passenger, authorities decided there was "no obvious intent," to do harm, and let it pass.) In all, 12 men were arrested and fined for fireworks violations. It wasn't nearly as many as there'd been in some recent years.
The most serious Christmas-Day confrontation came on State Street, where Patrolman Jesse Evans, one of three blacks on the police force, caught up with accused thief John Holland. While they wrestled, Holland shot Evans, and then, in the tussle, himself. Both wounds were serious, but Holland's was believed to be fatal.
"With the exception of the unfortunate shooting of Patrolman Evans," assessed the Journal & Tribune, "this was the quietest Christmas the police have spent in some time."
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