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The murky origins of the Knoxville Thanksgiving

by Jack Neely

Name any holiday of the year and it's safe to say it's not exactly what you think it is. A century ago, Halloween was a quiet, homey day for lovers. Christmas Eve was a loud day of fireworks and pranks. The only holiday that has maintained any sort of consistency over the last 210 years in Knoxville is the Fourth of July. And, I used to say, Thanksgiving.

But it turns out that Thanksgiving has gone through some twists and turns, too. Though we think of it as America's oldest homegrown holiday, celebrating and imitating a harvest celebration in Massachusetts almost 400 years ago, it seems not to have made a big impact in Knoxville until maybe 150 years ago. Maybe, in the heroic era of Crockett and Jackson, it wasn't celebrated here at all. Later, when it was, it was sometimes celebrated in December. And sometimes with fireworks.

In Knoxville papers of the 1790s, Thanksgiving is rarely mentioned. Some years ago, perusing the old Knoxville Gazette, I ran across one mention of Thanksgiving as a time when men of substance got together and raised toasts to General Washington and the Constitution. I didn't make a note of it, though, and going back into the archives, I couldn't find it this time. It apparently wasn't an every-year sort of thing.

President Washington made some proclamation about establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday, but it didn't take. Several succeeding presidents, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams, were positively opposed to government making a holiday of Thanksgiving, as a violation of the separation of church and state.

The holiday seemed to vanish from Knoxville's calendar in the first half of the 19th century. A few irregular November feasts took place in the Knoxville Hotel (only later called the Lamar House, now the front part of the Bijou Theatre) but most of them seem to be incidental dinners celebrating a visit from General Jackson or Congressman James K. Polk. In descriptions, the word Thanksgiving isn't attached to them.

But it's hard to judge. Journalism was a wholly different thing back then. Early 19th-century Knoxville newspapers are maddeningly unprovincial, full of news about dwarves and Mormons and mysterious fireballs and the unearthed skeletons of giants. You get the impression that antebellum Knoxvillians were too awed by the exotic world around them to take much interest in anything as mundane as an annual feast.

In the Knoxville Register of Nov. 20, 1821, the headline TURKEY seems to have promise. But it turns out to be about the Divan, Baron Stroganoff, and the Turko- Russian conflict. A few festive-sounding recipes, like one for apple pudding (calling for apples, egg yolks, and lots of sugar) published on the front page in November, 1830, are likely coincidences.

National sources, full of overstatements and flat-out errors, aren't much more reliable. According to one published source, before Lincoln's famous establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863, Thanksgiving was just "a local holiday in some places in New England."

A New England holiday it may have been, but it seems to have started seeping south long before Lincoln. It became an annual custom in New York state in 1817. By the 1840s, it was sprouting up all over. The Johnny Appleseed of Thanksgiving, a New Hampshire-born poet of children's verse, was destined to impress Thanksgiving on the American mind. In 1827, Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the Boston Ladies Magazine— and author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"—made a modest proposal that, church and state be damned, the states individually and collectively should make a legal holiday of Thanksgiving. It caught on in several northern states, but was slower to take in the South. According to the World Book encyclopedia, Virginia was the first southern state to celebrate Thanksgiving, and did so in 1855. The encyclopedia's editors were apparently suckers for Virginia braggadocio.

A spot check of about 25 Novembers' worth of Knoxville newspapers before 1855 disclosed only one mention of Thanksgiving. It's a quote from the Charleston News, published in the Knoxville Register on Nov. 3, 1847, announcing that New Hampshire, Missouri, Massachusetts, and New York, and perhaps Connecticut and Indiana, would be officially marking Thanksgiving on Nov. 25th.

The Register editorialized that "the peculiar fitness of the thing proposed commends it to universal adoption." Which, translated from the Victorian, means "Let's have Thanksgiving here, too."

And we apparently did, in some sort of form. It didn't make the papers, and details are scarce. But in the 1840s Kingston Pike planter Drury Paine Armstrong, of the riverside home still known as Crescent Bend, was keeping a diary. A terse, business-like document, it includes daily entries for about seven years, but is frustratingly short on cultural detail. He generally worked right through all holidays; he mentions Christmas only once, and then only as a season when his servants got some days off. For five years, the latter Thursdays of November on Armstrong's calendars were all unremarkable working days, days for doing business in town or slaughtering hogs. But on Nov. 25, 1847, Armstrong notes, "Thanksgiving day by proclamation of the governor. A pleasant day." The governor was Democrat Aaron Venable Brown, President Polk's old law partner whose recent call for volunteers for the Mexican War may have been the origin of Tennessee's nickname. Brown, by the way, had just been defeated for re-election.

After that, there are some gaps in the local-newspaper record. In 1851, writing for Godey's Ladies Book in Philadelphia, Mrs. Hale claimed that all of the states with the exception of two—Vermont, the most stubbornly independent of New England states, and Virginia, which would later claim to be the first Southern Thanksgiving state—were already celebrating Thanksgiving. She seemed satisfied that Tennessee was in her camp.

The first obvious description of a public Thanksgiving celebration in Knoxville was not in November at all. In 1855, November came and almost went before we heard anything about Thanksgiving. The official announcement, from the Nashville office of Gov. Andrew Johnson, arrived at the end of the month. Gov. Johnson told us official Thanksgiving was to be on Dec. 6, 1855. Coming in the year's last month, it sounds as if it had something of the character of a celebration of "the year now coming to a close," during which "we have as a people been blessed to an unwonted degree...."

At the time, the Register speculated, "We suppose the churches of our city will take steps for a proper observance of the day." One church took the lead. On Thursday, Dec. 6, all of Knoxville's congregations got together at the First Presbyterian Church at the corner of Church and State for a "Divine Service."

The following year, Gov. Johnson fell more in line with the rest of the country, allowing Tennessee the privilege of celebrating Thanksgiving in November. Maybe because Thanksgiving was becoming more popular, all of Knoxville's churches had their own Thanksgiving services.

But Tennessee was still out of step. That year, at least eight states celebrated Thanksgiving on Nov. 20. As much of the rest of the country chowed down, Tennesseans anxiously awaited word from the governor. "We suppose the proclamation has been thus far postponed," opined the Register, "in order that the Governor might learn the results of the election." As it turned out, Johnson did have something to celebrate; he'd been elected to the U.S. Senate, then considered a more prestigious post than governor.

"We presume our citizens will properly observe the day, and as is customary allow a suspension of business on the occasion." That line implies that there had been earlier Thanksgiving holidays here, but the custom apparently didn't go for the Register itself. The weekly paper that then came out on Thursdays was printed on Thanksgiving Day.

On Nov. 27, 1856, the Register announced, in a tiny item on page three, "To-day is Thanksgiving day. We understand there will be Divine Service at all the churches of the city—and 'big dinners' for as many as have the opportunity of enjoying them. It is usually a day of prayer and feasting—prayer for those who will, and feasting for those who can."

The following year, young Gov. Isham Harris, who was less popular in Knoxville than Johnson had been, did the honors. Register editor John Fleming wrote an editorial complaining about the governors' last-minute announcements, with an extra jab or two about the troubled economy in 1857. It may be the most sarcastic Thanksgiving editorial that has ever appeared in a Knoxville paper.

"This is the day set apart by GOVERNOR HARRIS to be observed by the people of Tennessee as a day of Thanksgiving.... Our governor, it seems to us, is invariably reluctant to issue his proclamation—the people have not had time to repress their querulous spirits and put themselves in a thankful frame of mind. Besides, the turkeys have not had time to fatten nor the housewives sufficient notice to get up an old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner. We object to being put off thus, every year, on short allowances.

"We have not yet learned how the day will be observed in this city, though we presume there will be divine service in the several churches. Our merchants will not be troubled seriously in suspending business, that matter having been pretty well attended to, already. We suppose, however, they will go through the formal ceremony of closing their doors."

Fleming included a sarcastic poem:

If the Thanksgiver thinks he thanks
And if the diner thinks he dines
They little know that broken banks
Have cut me short of meats and wines.

The poetic impulse apparently ran in the family; Fleming's daughter, Mary, would later write UT's less-cynical "Alma Mater."

By the time President Lincoln got around to declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday, he had things to be thankful for beyond a good harvest. The day, he announced, would be the last Thursday of the month: Nov. 26, 1863.

But Knoxville was distracted. The city was, on that first nationally official Thanksgiving Day, under siege, surrounded by some 20,000 Confederate troops intent on capturing Knoxville, some of them lobbing explosive shells into the city. As Confederates shifted their artillery and scouted for weak spots that Thursday, General Burnside, in charge of the Union garrison defending the city, responded to Lincoln's proclamation by issuing General Field Order Number 32, calling for a general observance of Thanksgiving. Exactly what that meant in wartime with short supplies is unclear. As Digby Seymour observes in Divided Loyalties, "His soldiers got a full ration of bullets but only a half-ration of bread."

Maybe memories of that first national Thanksgiving were behind the fact that in the years after the Civil War, Knoxvillians celebrated Thanksgiving with all sorts of fireworks. Even as the Thanksgiving Day churchgoing custom survived, Thanksgiving was also a noisy, rowdy day, as Presbyterian hymns were often interrupted by firecrackers.

Somehow Thanksgivings of the Victorian era were both more pious and more violent than later Thanksgivings would be. Things leveled out. By the 20th century, most Knoxvillians would be avoiding both church services and incendiary devices on Thanksgiving Day.