The 1813 James Park House, For Sale
by Jack Neely
It stopped me as I rounded the corner of Cumberland and Walnut near the post office. There at the old white-painted brick James Park House, underneath the spreading maple tree near the historical plaque, was a Coldwell Banker For Sale sign.
By my figuring, it's the second-oldest building downtown. Though it hasn't been the James Park home for over 85 years, it has been the James Park home for most of its history. It might be named for either of two James Parks, the Irish immigrant and onetime mayor who built most of it—or his son, the Presbyterian minister who was born here and, 90 years later, died here.
I'd never been inside the place. I'd rarely ever seen anybody coming or going. The sign, I thought, gave me an excuse. I walked up the interesting steps and rang the doorbell.
The white interior is elegant, but medically plain, with little money wasted on furniture. Through an archway is a large room in back set with a U of dining tables and hot trays with white towels on the shiny steel lids, left from a banquet several weeks ago.
The Knoxville Academy of Medicine has occupied the building for 55 years. An association of over 800 Knoxville physicians, the Academy tracks legislative issues of concern to doctors and also provides lists of specialists to interested parties. Once they performed more of an educational function, with doctors demonstrating new techniques in a 280-seat medical theater downstairs.
They built onto the back of it in a big way in the late '60s, expanding the place to 12,400 square feet—but they're moving, a representative told me, because they no longer need a place that big. Their gatherings tend to be smaller than they used to be, and they no longer have the museum of medical implements or the theater.
The lady I met couldn't think of anything especially interesting about the house, and told me their real-estate agent would be the best source for historical information about the Parks.
While I was waiting for the real-estate agent to call back, I went over to the McClung Collection, just in case they had something he didn't.
There are several legends about the house. Those of you over 120 years old will remember that Walnut Street was once named Crooked Street. It's no longer called Crooked, though it still is crooked, where it makes a dog-leg around the Park House.
A better-known legend is that during Knoxville's years as state capital, the house was meant to be the governor's mansion. According to the story, Sevier himself built the foundation and the lower five feet of brick wall. Then—in a day when being a state governor didn't necessarily imply financial solvency—he went broke.
Irishman James Park, born in Balleighan, County Donegal in 1770, was the upstart immigrant merchant who bought the half-started house in 1812, and finished it the following year.
In 1818, Park became mayor of Knoxville, only the second mayor in the city's history. There's a rare photograph of this Knoxvillian born before the Revolutionary War. Park was a severe-looking guy with a cane and gray sideburns and tiny glasses strapped to his forehead. A Presbyterian elder, he was sort of freelance theologian, a Calvinist scholar with a reputation for forceful, "harsh" opinions, known to scold even the clergy for deviations from the true path. But as strong as his opinions were, Park "had a great difficulty in expressing his sentiments, owing to an impediment in his utterances." He may have compensated through his writing; one of the more graceful prose stylists among Knox-ville's mayors, the elder Park sometimes penned book reviews and essays for the local papers.
As it turned out, James Park needed a big place. He and his Delaware-born wife, Sophia, had 12 children. The 11th was named for his father; James Park, the younger, was born in this house in 1822. At 18 he graduated from the university on the Hill, then went to seminary at Princeton. Ordained in 1848, Park served several Presbyterian churches in the area, including Rogersville and Cedar Springs. The elder James Park died in 1853. The younger one returned home to take over as superintendent for the School for the Deaf; then, just after the Civil War, he became minister of First Presbyterian at the corner of Church and State, which was recovering from severe abuse during the war; he would remain that church's chief minister for nearly 40 years.
Park was known to minister to the luckless. During the cholera epidemic of 1873, Park repeatedly visited a dying prostitute—with Mrs. Park accompanying him, the Victorian news accounts are careful to specify—and conducted her burial service.
He wore a long, white beard, mustache, wore a Prince Albert coat with a string tie, and carried a gold-handled cane with which he was known to whop an occasional impertinent kid on Market Square.
In 1890 Park was moderator of the General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church, that part of the church which had fractured southward after the Civil War. He retired in 1905, at 83. Weeks before his 90th birthday in 1912, Park died here in the house his father built almost exactly 100 years before.
His descendants sold the place. During World War I, it housed the "War Work Shop and Tea Room," for Red Cross ladies working on bandages and other war-effort projects. A long article published in the October, 1918, issue of The House Beautiful headlined the old Park residence as "The House Of a Thousand Memories." Some of these memories are scratched into the upstairs windows, girls' names, allegedly fiancees trying out their engagement diamonds.
In the 1920s, it became an ENT specialist's clinic, then a boarding house. In 1945, the KAM bought it. Now it's for sale.
The asking price, I hear, is $775 per memory.
June 21, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 25
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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