The uncertain fate of a house, and a neighborhood
by Jack Neely
Even 20 years ago, when there were many more Victorian houses still standing in Fort Sanders, this was one you noticed. Two tall stories plus a third-floor cupola, with stained glass and unusually ornate woodwork beneath the windows. It was one of the dozen or so best-preserved Victorian houses in Fort Sanders, owing a lot to the fact that it had always been a family house. Until the 1980s, it had never had an absentee owner. It's best known as the DeArmond House.
Its current ownership, and the rights that come with mere ownership, is the fulcrum of recent City Council resolutions, as well as a lawsuit against the city.
You can see it from Cumberland Ave. Right on the corner of Clinch and 15th (recently renamed for James Agee) the DeArmond house is closer to the street than modern folks expect to see a house, especially one this size. Records indicate it was designed by the firm of Baumann & Baumann in 1894, but its extravagant, asymmetrical design, including an interior spiral staircase, is unusual for that firm. People who've see the inside speak of it in awe. Even today, preservationists say there's not a more elaborate Victorian house in Fort Sanders, especially not one built of wood.
It changed hands about 20 years ago, and the rumor was that it might be torn down. It wasn't, but it acquired a sign out front that designated it as the Maranatha Chapel. I first assumed it was some Hindu Bolshevik sect, the sort of thing that, living in Fort Sanders, I was used to. They advertised with a revolutionary picture of a bearded guy who looked like Che Guevara. Living across the street, I was impressed with this eastern cult that seemed to be taking good care of the house; they painted the house a bright blue, with contrasting white trim. It was a few months before I realized that the bearded guerrilla on the sign was Jesus.
The Maranatha Chapel vanished, though, and the house was eventually divided into apartments. It goes by the last name of the house's first resident, Richard DeArmond.
The DeArmonds, who claimed descent from errant French aristocrats, were already an old family here when they built the house. Richard DeArmond had once seemed one of the political princes of Knoxville. At 23, he married Ella McGhee and found a niche for himself in the complicated Republican politics of post-Reconstruction Knoxville, appointed a U.S. marshal and twice elected to represent Knox County in the state legislature. A familiar face at the brand-new courthouse, DeArmond was sometimes listed in city directories as the courthouse's "custodian," but it's clear he was something other than a janitor. Sometimes called a "broker," he handled legal fees.
In 1889, the newly-elected legislator was one of the dignitaries who rode carriages out into a cotton field in Alabama to exhume the long-forgotten grave of a fellow French descendant named John Sevier. Perhaps because he was one of the younger delegates, DeArmond had a special ceremonial duty. He was the one who did the digging. As governors in top hats peered into the hole, DeArmond dug up John Sevier's 74-year-old grave to rebury the first governor's bones and teeth on the courthouse lawn.
The DeArmonds had four children, two sons and two daughters. At the time they moved into this new house, they ranged in age from 2 to 14.
It wasn't more than a year or two after they moved in that Richard DeArmond took ill. The nature of his disease is not recorded. But in 1898, Ella went to the courthouse where her husband had worked and had him declared "non compos mentis."
Someone took DeArmond to his mother's house in Tipton's Station, in the country south of the river, perhaps in hopes the change would do him good. There, on September 8, he died. He was only 45.
His obituary offered little about his disability beyond saying that he'd been ill for several months "and even previous to that time." The Journal & Tribune eulogized DeArmond as "one of Knox County's representative men."
Ella moved out of the house—but within a couple of years of her husband's death, she and her kids were living in another house next door. In the early 20th century, the block was popularly known as "Widows' Row." The eldest son, who spent his teen years in this house, moved to Midland, Texas, where he became a county attorney and judge.
Though the DeArmonds lived in the house for only three or four years, the family remained proud of it for decades afterward; it's even described in Richard DeArmond's biographical sketch in a national genealogical survey, published in 1954, called DeArmond Families of America: Richard DeArmond "owned a handsome house in the 1400 block of West Clinch Avenue, Knoxville."
Another family enjoyed a longer and happier residency here: wholesale clothing magnate John Gillespie, whose firm, Gillespie, Shields & Co., was a major presence in Knoxville business in the early 20th century. He and his wife, Hortense, had three kids; they were living here when John Jr. went off to fight in World War I, and when he returned safely. The Gillespies' daughter, Hortense, was organist and choirmaster at St. James Episcopal from the '20s through the '50s and lived here almost all her life, even through her own marriage to Cecil Anderson, a well-known attorney. He died in this house in 1978. Hortense Anderson sold it not long afterward.
It's not in quite as good shape as it was then; the current owner, Commercial Realty, divided it into apartments some years ago. Though their permit to demolish the house expired before City Council's moratorium on demolitions, there's more than one way to take down a landmark. The owners have left the upper windows of the DeArmond house open to the spring rains. They apparently want to make of the DeArmond House another parking lot.
I'd bet you could park 16, maybe even 18 cars here.
April 27, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 17
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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