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What:
The Vestival, the South Knoxville Arts and Heritage Festival

When:
Saturday, May 12, starting at 11 a.m.

Where:
Corner of Old Maryville Pike and Candora Street

The Vestival celebrates a vibrant, often forgotten part of Knoxville

by Jack Neely

On the corner of Maryville Pike and Candora Street is a building that stands out in this neighborhood and, for that matter, in this nation. Built of marble, it looks something like an ancient Italian villa, partly covered with bright-green Virginia creeper. A tall double-row allée of two dozen hemlocks shades the long entryway; on the lawn are several chunks of marble, some carved in vaguely art-nouveau styles.

The building is the original circa 1911 office of the Candoro Marble and Granite Co., which was located here for most of the 20th century. And this Saturday, it will be the site of the very first South Knoxville Art and Heritage Festival: the Vestival.

They're expecting a big crowd. Saturday at 9:30, police will even close down Maryville Pike. But a lot of people are wondering what the crowd will look like. Festival organizers are inviting everybody, old and young, and they've got keen interest from across South Knoxville's often-contentious political spectrum. It's safe to say that the particular group of people who will convene at the old Candoro place have never been in the same place before.

"Expect to see all kinds," advises organizer Trudy Monaco: "from the jet set to the Chevrolett set." She uses the phrase in the festival's advertising.

"There's a lot of strength in this community," she says, "a lot of energy and a lot of community spirit. But the people gather in very small groups." Churches may be the main gathering places in South Knoxville, and some of them are very small. Much of the festival will celebrate the community's past, Monaco says; "A lot of the time, when people look back on their past, they find they have more in common than they thought they did."

Monaco, who doesn't look 53, has lived in the neighborhood since 1993. While taking some multidisciplinary post-graduate courses at UT, her study of mosaics brought her to Bruce Bennett's marble workshop on Candora. Bennett uses the newest building that was once part of the Candora complex, a utilitarian cinderblock building across the street from the huge turn-of-the-century factory building, most of its hundreds of windows still intact.

When Monaco was working at Bennett's workshop, she couldn't help but notice the one building here that was built to look at—the Candoro headquarters and its handsome lawn. It seemed fit for a festival. Or, more precisely, a Vestival.

She describes it as a real "community festival," relying on neighbors to make up most of the entertainment and most of the audience. She was gratified to get early and vigorous support from County Commissioner Howard Pinkston, who's apparently happy for the chance to show his festive side.

If the festival has a purpose beyond reintroducing Vestal to itself, it will be to introduce Vestal to the rest of Knoxville.

South Knoxville can be an intimidating place for outsiders. Especially Vestal, that part between Chapman and Alcoa Highways. Narrow, winding roads that twist and turn and dip underneath railroad trestles; surrounded by honeysuckle and kudzu, some houses have No Trespassing signs tacked to the porch post right above the Welcome mat.

"A long time ago, people called it South America, and some still do," says Rick Pollard. "Just yesterday, I heard a lady say, 'I'm going to South America today.'" (Describing the same phenomenon later in the conversation, he makes an equally distant allusion in the opposite direction: "For a period of time," he says, "if you were to mention to somebody in Knoxville that you were going to Vestal, you might as well be going to Fairbanks, Alaska.")

Except for the fact that, due to family considerations, he now lives in Sweetwater, Pollard is as Vestal as they come. His great-granddad worked for the Vestal Lumber Co. (Contrary to generations of jokes about virgins, Vestal got its name from the Vestal Lumber and Manufacturing Co., founded by the Vestal brothers in 1902. The Mary Vestal of Mary Vestal Park was their mother.) Pollard's uncle ran the Vestal Barber Shop on Ogle. His granddad was, for half a century, an executive at Candoro.

He played on Candoro's little-league team. He attended old Young High before graduating from Doyle. He worked at Candoro for a while and never lost his fascination for the process of marble work. A few years ago, he co-founded the Vestal Community Organization.

"Vestal has a real small-town atmosphere," he says. "Even though it's a part of Knoxville, it's separate."

He recalls that Vestal took some serious blows in his young adulthood with the decline of its two biggest employers: Vestal Lumber and Candoro, which both went out of business more than a dozen years ago. "Vestal has gotten a bad rap," in recent decades, Pollard acknowledges, a fact he attributes to the introduction of a housing project to the neighborhood and some landowners' neglect. "That's the worst thing, in my mind. Some of these houses were beautiful Victorian houses. But people just let 'em fall in." He mentions his own mother's home place, a three-story home that's now a church parking lot.

"But things are getting better," he says. He's tickled about the festival, which he thinks is likely to be the biggest party in Vestal's modern history.

Of course, Pollard will be there Saturday. He plays guitar and mandolin for a band called the Blue Mooners that sometimes makes appearances at the Southside Sports Bar on Chapman Highway.

Music, especially old-time and bluegrass bands, will be a big part of the festival; friends and strangers alike are invited to bring their instruments. Other entertainers will include local folk star Sean McCullough, Sassafras, Casey Jones, the Baptist Ministry Singers, some classical piano and violin waltzes, and the Pickers and Grinners, which Monaco describes as "the old Colonial Hardware group." There will be pony rides, a petting zoo, some modern dance, a storytelling tent, quilters, glassblowers, potters, a variety of food, exhibits of various sorts.

Probably no exhibit will overshadow the festival's marble centerpiece. Few Knoxvillians have ever gotten a close look at the old Candoro building. "It's one of the prettiest buildings I've seen in Knoxville," Pollard says.

"I fell in love with this building," says Monaco. "I'm from the Florida Keys, where there are not a lot of old things. I'm just mystified by anything old."

Inside the main building, the foyer's vaulted ceiling is painted with unusual designs, and the floors and walls are made of marble and even polished coral. Different rooms feature different styles and strains of polished marble, as if each office were used as a sample for prospective clients. Behind and to the side is an old, Mediterranean-style four-door carriage house with arched bays and a clay-tiled roof.

As gorgeous as the building is today, it has lost a lot to vandals and thieves over the years. Pollard remembers an iron gate, copper guttering, and a marble lion fountain in the foyer which disappeared soon after the company's sudden death.

Candoro was a sort of acronym for founders John J. Craig, whose marble company predated Candoro, F.C. Anderson, W.J. Donaldson, and Sam Rodgers. From its founding in 1914 to 1918 it was known by the more feminine Candora, which is also the name of the cross street here. Whether by design or remarkable coincidence, candora is also the name of a fine Italian marble.

By whatever name—even with the masculine ending, it was generally pronounced roughly like Candora—Candoro was once the single biggest employer in Vestal and one of Knoxville's more dynamic factories. Marble, usually mined from quarries at Friendsville and more distant points, arrived here by rail in 100-ton blocks to be processed in the huge hangar-like building with hundreds of window panes, just beyond the Candoro office building (it's allegedly even older than the showplace, dating to 1902). Candoro did all sorts of marble work for a local and national market, perhaps most famously for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. At its height, Candoro employed 200 at this site. It remained in business, under different ownership, until its ungraceful end in 1988. Candoro, being sued over a disagreement about materials intended for the new John Duncan Federal Building, was closed by the IRS due to failure to pay almost $100,000 in taxes.

There's a lot of culture in Candoro itself—though mass-produced in an industrial setting, much of Candoro's work can easily pass for art—but it's only part of the community's rich cultural heritage.

South Knoxville has a culture and a heritage, whether it likes it or not. Paul Y. Anderson, the Pulitzer-winning Washington-beat reporter of the Roaring '20s, and probably the finest newspaper reporter ever to come out of East Tennessee, was the prototypical South Knoxvillian, the tough, pugnacious son of a marble quarryman killed in a derrick accident.

Several of the most famous living Knoxvillians and former Knoxvillians are Vestal-bred. Cormac McCarthy, Knoxville's most successful living writer (Suttree, All the Pretty Horses), is a South Knoxville boy who spent most of his youth on Martin Mill Pike.

When Metro Pulse readers voted for Knoxville's best actors, they voted for another couple of tough guys. David Keith and Johnny Knoxville came in first and second in the balloting. They're both recognizable nationwide, and they're both from Vestal.

And it's the home of Doris Sams, who played in the first women's baseball team, allegedly the inspiration for the popular movie A League Of Their Own. In 1947, at the age of 21, Sams pitched a perfect game.

She'll be at the festival. Not as pitcher, but as the special-guest judge of the first annual Vestival bakeoff.