A few wet days in March, 1867
by Jack Neely
Look back 135 years and images are distorted. It's almost as if you're looking at familiar images underwater. In 1867, Tennessee Gov. W. G. "Parson" Brownlow, the Republican, was gleefully predicting "the Death of Conservatism."
It was an election year for Brownlow, and Republicans were accusing Democrats in a proto-Watergate scandal. "Dirty Dog" Democrats, they claimed, were eavesdropping at Republican keyholes. The Whig, Brownlow's weekly, recommended this tactic to deal with Conservative Democrat spies: "If they refuse to halt, and attempt to get away, take deliberate aim and bring them to a halt with a shot from Colt's revolver...."
Worse were horrible tales of "atrocious murders and numerous outrages" against those loyal to the government. Not quite two years after the end of the War, much of the violence in Tennessee was blamed on former Confederates. Gov. Brownlow announced the formation of a Tennessee State Guard that would be commissioned to restore order.
But the war was over, mostly, and this ideologically tortured, war-scarred city seemed new in some ways. Energetic newcomers were flowing into town. And the county had recently purchased Gen. Burnside's three-year-old military bridge, for use by Knoxvillians. The south side of the river—due to its remoteness, it had been known for years as South America—was now accessible.
To some businessmen, Knoxville looked like a boom town. The burgeoning new firm of Gasper & Davis ran a sizeable Sash, Blind, and Door factory at the mouth of First Creek. Their name was a bit of an understatement: Gasper & Davis boasted that, "Having machinery of all kinds, we can build houses cheaper, quicker, and better than any one else." Knoxville was growing too fast for the old ways.
There was a freshness in the air. It was March, and spring was just around the corner. And, as it does every March, it started to rain. "The storms came, and such storms," went one news report. "All will remember the rain fell in torrents, the lightning flashed, and the thunder clashed, and from Saturday night; Sunday and Sunday night; Monday and Monday night; Tuesday and Tuesday night; Wednesday and Wednesday night; up to Thursday night, the rain continued to fall and floods continued to follow...."
The creeks rose. The river rose. To most Knoxvillians, it was mainly a spectacle. Some 75 years earlier, Knoxville's founders, fearing Indian attack, had built their city at the top of a bluff.
"Hundreds of our citizens, of all ages, sexes, and colors, crowded along the riverbank to behold the turbid waters dash impetuously forward, carrying everything away by their irresistible power." Old-timers said the surging river was a couple of fathoms deeper than they'd ever seen it. And it was still rising.
The waters carried much away: a whole sawmill; a whole grist mill; the feed store by the slaughterhouse; 600,000 feet of lumber from Coker's warehouse. Williams Island (which would later be known as Dickinson Island, site of an airport) was underwater. The cattle grazing there vanished in the currents.
Perhaps the biggest industrial loss in town was the impressive house building works at the mouth of First Creek. Every bit of Gasper & Davis's famous machinery slipped out into the muddy river.
Spectators watched as a large local landmark known as "the old red warehouse" went by in the parade of debris. It "sailed majestically down the river, no doubt the largest craft that has ever gone down [these] waters...."
The spectators also would have seen several bridges go by. The Main Street Bridge, which crossed First Creek, "floated away." The new Holston River Bridge from Strawberry Plains disappeared downriver. Even the first Gay Street Bridge, built hardly three years before by Burnside's engineers, was at risk. On Tuesday morning, a Whig reporter noted that "the bridge over the river here is expected to be carried away by the flood." It was. Brownlow's paper reported proudly that the former Union bridge lasted 12 hours longer than anyone expected it to.
County Judge Columbus Jones saved the Cumberland Avenue Bridge across First Creek, but only by removing all of its planking. The Whig pronounced him a hero, perhaps because the bridge led to Parson Brownlow's house. But the judge said somebody else could put it back together.
"Over 200 persons were washed out of their homes in Knoxville," went one report. Most were likely poor people who lived along First and Second Creeks. Most of Knoxville remained high if not dry, but roads and railroads out of town were flooded. For days it was hazardous to leave Knoxville except by riverboat, the Mary Bird.
Floodwaters reached Chattanooga faster than news from Knoxville, and hit that lower-lying city much harder. The Great Flood of 1867 inundated Chattanooga's downtown streets with several feet of water and destroyed a reported 10 percent of the city's assets. At one point, they say, sternwheelers were churning up the streets.
In Knoxville, the river crested at 33 feet above its normal level; the spectators' excitement eventually receded with the waters. The financially obsessed newspapers offer little about human casualties, but there came apocalyptic stories of townspeople plucking bloated corpses out of trees along First Creek.
In 1947, excavation workers happened upon an old stone pier with a chiseled inscription: H.W.M. 1867. An unknown chronicler had felt obliged to mark the high water mark of our biggest flood.
March 20, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 12
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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