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Another Smith House and Another Phoenix Building

by Jack Neely

Our annual Agee Toast earlier this month had a melancholy cast to it. We meet every May at the site where James Agee's father wrecked his Ford, inspiring a novel called A Death In the Family, and, maybe, an exceptional literary career. It's on Clinton Highway or, as it was known in 1916, Clinton Pike.

Fortunately for us, there's a bar there now. It's not always a literary sort of place, but the stock-car-racing saloon called the Checker Flag is as appropriate a spot for the gathering as we could have hoped for.

The Agee Toast has never been complete without a visit to the old blacksmith's house, right across the highway from the Checker Flag. The old house on the banks of Beaver Creek was allegedly the home of the blacksmith who ran the shop described in the novel as Brannock's, the place where they took the body of 38-year-old Jay Follett. The actual shop had vanished years ago, and the smithy's own house, which once stood behind it, had been vacant for several decades. (I'd call it the Smith House, but I'm afraid it might confuse folks.) The last couple of times I saw it, it was a board-and-batten ruin, dumped toward the creek by some earth moving next door. This neighborhood is changing rapidly. It's still outside the city limits, but now this part of the highway's beginning to look like the rest of Clinton Highway.

During World War I it was way out in the country, described as "13 miles west of the city" in Mr. Agee's obituary. It was still pretty rural when Jack Rentfro and I first came out here in the '80s, summoned by a column by the late Knoxville Journal columnist, Vic Weals, who claimed to have nailed down the very site of the wreck.

Anyway, we had a fine meeting at the Checker Flag this year, but we couldn't deny a melancholy pall. We'd noticed something different before we even went inside. The blacksmith's house was gone. Utterly gone, without a trace except for a pair of bulldozer tracks down to the site.

I'm not about to suggest it should have been restored. It was beyond hope except as an intriguing ruin the last time I saw it, and, probably, the first time.

Once or twice a year I get queries from out-of-towners asking for directions to the site, and it was useful to be able to refer to an actual ruin. But Americans don't love ruins, even the vaguely literary ones. We look at them and say, Somebody might get hurt. Regardless of whatever immortality-by-association a famous novel gave it, as a building, the smith's house was mortal.

I don't know whether Knox Heritage offers an award for Bizarre Renovation-Related Coincidence Of the Year, but my nomination goes to the 104-year-old Fowler's Building, recently renamed "the Phoenix." Wayne Blasius, who's developing the big, six-story landmark at 418-20 Gay Street as restaurant, office, and residential space, didn't have anything against the furniture company that was located there for over 50 years, the name by which most older folks still know the building. But Wayne wasn't planning to sell furniture, himself, and wanted to give the building a name of its own, unconnected to its previous occupants.

In late 1999, in the early stages of its renovations, the building suffered a major fire apparently sparked by a roofer's torch. Blasius and Co. did an admirable job repairing it, and picked a name to reflect the building's resilience, and its origin. It rose from the ashes, sort of like it did when it was originally built, after the 1897 fire that leveled most of this block. The Million-Dollar Fire is remembered as the worst fire in Knoxville history. Wayne thought the "Phoenix," the fire-surviving beast of classical mythology, made a clever name for his big new project.

That's why he was flabbergasted sometime later when, studying some 1898 titles to the then-new property, he ran across that name again. These legal documents were no more clear than most legal documents, and some of their plot descriptions were a little garbled. But they seemed to refer to the Fowler's Building as "the Phoenix Building."

Blasius had a hard time believing that people in 1898 were already using the name he picked for his building, and asked if I could help confirm it. I looked it up in city directories, which sometimes list building names—but this address was always listed by its resident business, originally Cullen & Newman Queensware. The word Phoenix didn't show. I asked around. The oldest old-timers I knew didn't remember anybody ever calling that building "the Phoenix."

I was about to give up, hoping Wayne would be content with that stray reference in one legal document. However, just before I quit, I thumbed through an old promotional brochure at the McClung Collection and found a detailed sketch of Cullen & Newman's facade, as it appeared in 1900.

When I saw it I knew that Blasius's hunch was right. This building had a name of its own, and the builders obviously wanted everybody down on Gay Street to know it. Engraved in large letters across the top floor were the words THE PHOENIX. And on top of that was a big statue, perhaps in stone, of a defiant bird with spreading wings. It's not a sparrow.

I don't know what happened to the statue. Architectural surveys seem to indicate that this building's uppermost floors were removed and replaced sometime early in the century; the old Victorian embellishments apparently didn't survive into the Fowler's era.

But if you happen to have a peculiar antique stone statue of a winged mythological beast in your garden, I bet Wayne Blasius would like to chat with you.