Metro Pulse/Secret History/Let's Polka!

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The Strohaus Returns, for one night

by Jack Neely

When I'm in my dotage, a strange memory will come to me unbidden. Late at night, I'm in a huge room, like a medieval hall, full of people. I don't know a single one of them, but there are hundreds, and everybody's smiling, everybody's drinking beer. A German oompah band, in lederhosen, wearing alpine caps with feathers, playing polka music. Plump middle-aged people, each with hands on the hips of the person in front of them, boy-girl-boy-girl, hopping around the room in time to the music. A woman in back suggesting that I grab her hips and join along. I don't. Not because I don't want to grab her hips, but only because I don't understand what would happen afterward: who would, in turn, grab my hips, whether I would get the hopping right, and how long I would be obliged to remain part of this fleshy train.

I will not be able to place that memory, and it will hound me. I will conclude it was a bizarre dream. But then I'll describe it to a contemporary, another old man drooling in his wheelchair. He'll croak, "Sounds like the Strohaus." Maybe then it will all come back to me.

This weekend, those who missed the Strohaus the first time around have a chance to catch its revival.

I never set out to go to the Strohaus—I was 24 and single, and the Strohaus, like most of the Fair, seemed geared more for older folks. But somehow I often ended up there. I'd heard that Jerry Lee Lewis showed up there one day and started banging away on the piano. I missed that, and hated myself for it, but returned to the Strohaus often, keeping an eye out for Carl Perkins or Bill Haley or maybe Elvis.

To me, the Strohaus every night was an anthropological phenomenon. As a young adult in post-prohibition Knoxville, I was still not used to seeing large numbers of grownups—people over 30, yet—drinking beer and laughing out loud. Not to mention doing the bunny hop. I had the impression that the older people got, the quieter they got, the earlier they went to bed, the less they came out in public, the less vigorously they moved around a room. The Strohaus abolished my prejudices about middle age.

At the Strohaus, middle age always seemed a good deal more lively if you had a Midwestern accent. I wondered how they found each other, whether the Strohaus was packed nightly with tour buses from Iowa and Wisconsin, or if they just gravitated toward the polka.

I didn't then know anything about this big gable-roofed brick building that looked something like a church. It wasn't a church, or an entertainment hall. It was the last remaining vestige of the large factory complex of the Knoxville Iron Company. Before this city was a textile-mill town, long before it had any reputation as a college town, Knoxville was an iron town, smelting and working the region's iron ore. Knoxville Iron was our biggest iron factory. They say the glow from its brick kilns would light up the night sky.

Founded just after the war by a couple of Welsh immigrant brothers and a former Union officer named Hiram Chamberlain, the company employed several hundred ironworkers, making it Knoxville's biggest employer of its era. It was the kernel of the workers' neighborhood that became known as Mechanicsville. Here in the old factory on Asylum Avenue, beside Second Creek, they manufactured all sorts of iron, but were known for nails and railroad spikes.

Chamberlain was a vigorous industrialist who became something of a civil-rights evangelist. In the postwar years Chamberlain traveled the deep, resentful South, making risky claims before skeptical crowds, mainly that free blacks were good industrial workers, responsible homeowners and as capable of taking care of themselves as whites were.

The Foundry, built by 1867, was only one of about seven large factory buildings that once made up the Knoxville Iron Co. For us, it's the most important one, if only because it's the one that's still there. It may be the oldest industrial building in town.

In 1903—just before the nearby L&N station was built—the Knoxville Iron Co. moved to Tennessee Avenue, in Lonsdale, where it survives today as an Ameristeel plant. For the next 75 years or so, the old foundry served as a warehouse. People were just talking about the roles it might play in an unlikely World's Fair when in 1979, it caught on fire. Heavily damaged, it might have been razed if not for the prospect of using it as a German-style "festhaus" during the Fair. The Montreal-based developer declared it would be "the best German beer hall that's ever been in North America."

As far as I know, it was. Anyway, this Saturday, the folks now in charge of the Foundry will attempt a dangerous reunion of the original elements of the Strohaus. The Bavarian Funmaker Band, which I was surprised to learn is still intact and making a living in Gatlinburg, will be down for the event. Organizer Marianne Greene is working from an original Strohaus menu to recreate the tastes and smells of the place with offerings of metts and beans (Knoxville's contribution to the international fair), knackwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad, and streusel. Conspicuously absent, of course, will be Stroh's Beer, which is hard to find these days. They'll try to make do with some Miller's and a full bar. The point of it all is to raise money for the Sertoma Center and Friends of Tennessee Infant Parent Services. It will be a rare chance to drink beer and act silly and feel good about it the next day.