Metro Pulse/Gamut/Old Gray Cemetary

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What:
Old Gray Cemetery's Sesquitennial Observance

Where:
Old Gray Cemetery, 543 N. Broadway

When:
Sunday, June 4, 4 p.m.

Revisiting the monuments of Old Gray Cemetery on its 150th anniversary

by Jack Neely

The narrow gates of Old Gray were designed to admit Victorian-era carriages, but if you're careful you can drive a gasoline-powered car through them and past the old marble gatehouse on the right.

Walking there will put you in a mood more befitting of this place. Old Gray is just a few minutes' stroll from downtown. Walk to the north end of Gay Street, turn left at Emory Place, cross Broadway at the old Lutheran Church, and there you are. However you get there, you pass through those old gates and find yourself in a cemetery that's much larger than it looks from the road. Then again, at not quite 14 acres, it's not as big as it seems after you've spent an afternoon walking around it.

Parts of it look like a city, built at about one-eighth scale, of marble. Its buildings are statues, crosses, crypts, obelisks, benches, marble stones of all sizes and shapes, inscribed with many names you'll recognize and many you won't. Some of the stones are bearing up well, after a century or more; others are beginning to look like they were carved in butter. The stones and these narrow lanes follow the contours of this hilly garden. Most of it is in the shade of some very tall oak trees, a reminder of the forest that was here before.

In a ceremony this Saturday afternoon, Old Gray Cemetery will celebrate its sesquicentennial. It has been here since 1850.

Knoxville was a muddy little town in 1850; its only reason for existing had been its status as a territorial and state capital, and it had lost that status 30 years ago. Without gaslights or a railroad, Knoxville didn't seem to have much going for it except for a tiny college and a school for the deaf. Somehow, though, people still lived here—just recently, Irish, Swiss, and German immigrants had been pouring in—and people still died here. Downtown's churchyards were small and more crowded with every epidemic.

John Crozier was one of Knoxville's hotshots, the 38-year-old lawyer and former Whig congressman. Crozier led the committee that purchased this spot, then a dense oak forest on the northwest side of town, to be a public burying ground.

They needed a name for the place, and argued about it for weeks. Most of the first names they came up were so bland they sound like 20th-century shopping malls, names ending in dale and vale. Henrietta Reese, the wife of the university's president, saved us from that by suggesting a plain but solid name: Gray, to honor an English poet who had died almost 80 years before. Thomas Gray never lived in Tennessee, or America, but he did write a poem, still popular in 1850, called "Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard." It's the one that goes

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave
Awaits alike the inevitable hour
The paths of glory lead but to the grave....

The Victorians found a loophole in Gray's warning when they discovered that graveyards themselves can be paths of glory. There's more heraldry, pomp, beauty, and wealth in Old Gray than you'll find in any live CEO's office.

They chose to build it on a model still new to America, the suburban garden-style cemetery, similar to Pere LaChaise in Paris. By the new rules of this modern Victorian age, cemeteries would be places of beauty, parks and gardens even the non-bereaved would visit.

According to tradition, the first burial was unexpected: one William Martin, an ironworker new to town. He was attending a Fourth of July celebration downtown in 1851 when a cannon fired prematurely and blew off his arm. He died 10 days later and became the very first of well over 10,000 Knoxvillians buried here.

It was known as Gray Cemetery for about half a century; after the much-larger cemetery New Gray was established on Western Avenue in the 1890s, this became known as Old Gray. The name fits it well. Today, a hue of gray you might call old gray is the dominant color here, the color of weathered marble and granite.

It's safe to say most Knoxvillians have never been to Old Gray. New burials aren't unknown here, but they don't happen every week; people who never visit graveyards except for graveside services may miss it altogether. I'd heard of Old Gray during my first 35 years in Knoxville, but never stopped by. It's one of those places more likely to catch the imagination of people who are new to town, who are from one of the many cities in America that have nothing like Old Gray. When I worked at Whittle Communications, colleagues from out of state would walk or jog through Old Gray in the morning or take picnics there at lunchtime, then come into the office raving about the high-Victorian graveyard with the huge oak trees and the interesting statuary, describing it excitedly, like they would describe a new movie or a dream.

My friend Jonathan Tuttle, an art designer from Florida, was one of them. He'd been talking about Old Gray for months, suggesting it might be a good subject for the historical column I'd started writing in that new tabloid, and I kept promising I'd go out there and have a look around, but I never did. The day Jonathan and I learned we'd gotten laid off, we weren't feeling especially dutiful. Instead of sitting at our old desks answering phone calls about a magazine other people were taking over, we got in Jonathan's rusty old Volvo and drove out to Old Gray.

It had a strange effect on a guy who'd been writing about Knoxville history. That first trip was like walking into a garden party where I knew everybody. There's Thomas Humes, the Episcopal rector and UT president that freshmen were known to call "Limping Jesus"; the story was that he'd been wounded in the leg by a Confederate sniper. There's Peter Kern, the errant German immigrant who landed in Knoxville accidentally, held captive by the Union army; with nothing else to do, he founded a bakery, raised a family, and later became mayor. There's Catherine Wiley, the turn-of-the-century impressionist artist who died in an asylum. There are the Mabrys, inscribed on different sides of the same short obelisk with the same death date—and Thomas O'Conner, the man who shot them both, with that same date again. Henry Gibson, the longtime Republican congressman, who as his stone reminds us, wrote the science-fiction poem, "The Moon Maiden."

There's McGhee Tyson, for whom the airport is named, the golf pro and aviator who went down in the North Sea in 1918, and beside him, his father, the World War I general who found his body. The Tyson obelisk's only rival for size is that of Parson Brownlow himself, the Republican governor and senator, the most controversial politician in Tennessee history—and just across the lane, an irony noted more than a century ago, is Col. Ashby, the Confederate prison-camp commandante killed in a gunfight on Walnut Street with Union Major Camp, three years after the war. And there's Major Camp, who later built the mansion down the street known as Graystone, over there. Here's Perez Dickinson, Emily's cousin and friend, who built his Island Home across the river. Over there's Ebenezer Alexander, the sickly classics professor who was one of the founders of the international Olympic games in Athens. There's William Rule, whose grave his former protege, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, visited.

It's one of several graves with literary connections in this graveyard named for a poet. Some of these graves have actually been settings for literary works.

There, with a more conventional, 20th-century rectangular stone, Cornelius Williams, Tennessee Williams' Knoxville-raised dad who had moved back here before he died in 1957. Tennessee Williams himself attended the burial, and later wrote an essay about the burial, and his father, and their tortured relationship. The essay, called "The Man In the Overstuffed Chair," is used as an introduction in Williams' collected stories.

English-born novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett's mother is buried here; her lone stone, dating from 1870, may be the only relic of the author in the city where she began her career. Nearby is the empty plot marked TAYLOR on the step. This spot set the scene for Pulitzer-winner Peter Taylor's final novel, In the Tennessee Country. For a quarter century it held the grave of colorful governor and senator Robert "Our Bob" Taylor. The novel describes his burial, attended by an estimated 40,000 people, and explains why this plot no longer contains Taylor's remains.

There's a statue on the grave of Virginia Coxe, the turn-of-the-century romance novelist. Some of these statues are gorgeous. The statue of the Virgin Mary, carved in Italian marble said to be from Michaelangelo's favorite quarry, is at the grave of Eleanor Audigier. And Lillien Gaines, the melancholy eight-year-old girl, can still make you feel her parents' pain.

This statuary wasn't built just for the squirrels to look at. Today, Old Gray's maintained by a private consortium of the families of the people buried here, but it's usually open to the public. You can visit Old Gray any time, but if you want some company, this Saturday at 4 o'clock will be a ceremony in honor of Old Gray's 150th anniversary, with talks about the graveyard's history and tours of the grounds. Come and have a look around.

Everybody's here. I've been back 40 or 50 times, and each trip I learn something I didn't know before. Old Gray's so rich, in large part, because its heyday was Knoxville's. Soon after the first burials here, the railroads arrived, just a couple of blocks away, and Knoxville rapidly became an industrial city. As Knoxville boomed, multiplied in size, so did Old Gray. With Knoxville's Victorian prosperity came people from all over the western world. Many of them wound up here. No other place in town better reflects the thriving, diverse community that Knoxville was in the half-century after the Civil War.

In Old Gray are about as many McMillans and McMullens and McClungs as you'd expect in a Knoxville graveyard; but there are lots of other names, even on the older and more prominent monuments, that are a long way from the Scots-Irish that allegedly dominate Knoxville: Ricardi. Gratz. Blanc. Kohlhase. Esperandieu. Zimmerman. Chavannes. Fouche. Guyaz. Aebli. Knaffl. Jaques. Many of the people buried here spoke with strong accents; some never learned English at all. All these people are dead, but they have enough chutspah to surprise you, to get up and disprove any number of simplistic theories about their home town.

Looking at these extravagant monuments, you get the unmistakable impression that these people died in a much prouder, more confident, more profound city than we might recognize.