The Lockett House, before it earned its title
by Jack Neely
I hear there are positive developments in the effort to save the good Lord Lindsey. It's not only a popular nightclub and setting for various launches, receptions, and awards ceremonies. It's also a rare reminder of the days when Hill Avenue was stylish. In spite of the fact that the jail was down the street, it was a fine place to live: town handy on one side; a view of the river, still alive with sternwheelers in the industrial and excursion trade, on the other. People try to simplify the part of town "where all the rich people lived," but Hill Avenue was long one of those places.
One of the threatened houses is the Temple house, on the Henley corner, which even some preservationists reckon may be impractical to preserve. Which is ironic, because it was the home of Mary Boyce Temple, who footed the bill to save Blount Mansion from parking-lot oblivion in 1925, founding the idea of Knoxville preservationism.
Several of my preservationist pals don't have much use for the drab little ca. 1947 cinderblock duplex in between the Lord Lindsey and the Temple house. I even like that house, just because you don't see many like it in Knoxville. It looks like Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, a place where Marlowe arrives looking for a key witness but instead finds another interesting corpse.
Of the three, the Lord Lindsey may be the most worthy of saving. It sticks out a little in downtown Knoxville, with its grand plantation-style columns. You don't see those much in historic buildings around here, and there's a story behind them.
It became the Lord Lindsey only when owner Kristopher Kendrick bestowed that title on it in 1976. By my figuring, that alone makes it the oldest continually operating bar/nightclub downtown. Before it was the Lord Lindsey, it was, for nearly half a century, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which had founded a Knoxville congregation in the 1890s. From 1927 to 1976, this house was home to the main local congregation of that peculiarly American denomination. No building in the Knoxville area has served that purpose longer.
But if you look it up in the McClung Collection, the house doesn't appear as either the Lord Lindsey or as a Christian Science church. It's the Lockett House. The builder, sometimes listed as Albert Percival Lockett—he preferred the name Percy for almost all purposes—was born in Macon, Miss., during Reconstruction, but moved to Knoxville with his family as a boy. As a young man, he met Minna Howard, another Mississippi native who was in town visiting her relatives, the McClungs. They married, but Minna moved north reluctantly.
A successful Knoxville businessman, Lockett built the house with four tall Corinthian columns and, originally, a second-floor balcony. The design was old-fashioned even in 1900; the story goes that he picked it to please his homesick wife. It's said to be a rough copy of her family home in Mississippi.
He could apparently afford to indulge her. Lockett was an executive in his late father's family business, W.B. Lockett & Co., a wholesale grocery concern on Jackson Avenue. Later, while A.P. lived in this house, he and his brother Edward got involved with the booming textile business when they bought Jefferson Woolen Mills and moved it to Knoxville.
For a woman who wasn't allowed to vote, Minna Lockett was a player in early 20th-century Knoxville. She was in charge of the Women's Board at the impressive 1911 Appalachian Exposition at Chilhowee Park. She pushed the Victory Garden movement during World War I, and was involved with her neighbor Mary Boyce Temple in the effort to save the mansion down the street. She was also an early golfer. She raised two kids in the house, a boy and a girl.
The house may have seen more than its share of sudden grief. In April, 1912, days after the Titanic sank, a mysterious fire broke out at the old Marion Flats on nearby Church Street. Lockett's sister-in-law Katie, mother of five, died in an apartment fire in which her husband, Percy's brother, was injured. They held the funeral here in the house.
Katie's son, Edward, was a pioneer car dealer in 1916 when his National flipped in an auto race at the old Cal Johnson track in East Knoxville. The 23-year-old died on the scene. The Locketts held that funeral in this white-columned house, too.
In his late 40s, at about the time of the end of the Great War, Percy Lockett contracted tuberculosis. It was then a diagnosis of slow death. He and his wife moved to "Crescent Bend," the old Armstrong mansion on Kingston Pike, which would become known as the Armstrong-Lockett house. If not for her husband's illness, it might have been a satisfying move for Minna Lockett: although it lacked Deep South grandiosity, it was, finally, a real antebellum mansion.
Lockett's mother, Margaret Augusta Lockett, widowed for 30 years, remained in the house on Hill Avenue until her death in 1925.
The house downtown was empty when Percy Lockett died suddenly in his bedroom at Crescent Bend the following year, 1926. He was 56. "The family urgently requests that flowers be omitted," went the unusual obituary. "Reports that Mr. Lockett had shot himself were denied at the home." The doctor officially attributed his death to "exhaustion." Percy Lockett was buried at Old Gray the day his death was announced.
Their daughter, Margaret, who grew up in the house on Hill Avenue, married diplomat Philip Bonsal, and lived with him in Havana when he was the last U.S. ambassador to Cuba during Castro's early years.
And, for now, it appears Minna's house will remain. But let's keep an eye on it.
May 22, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 21
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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