Metro Pulse/Cover/The Drinking Issue

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Knox-a-hol over the Years

Passing the Bar
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Surfer on Acid

Those Buckets O' Blood Have Emptied Out
All our rowdy friends have settled down

Drinking Factoids & Trivia

Per capita age 21+ beer consumption in Tennessee in 1999: 31.4 gallons, or approximately 335 twelve-ounce bottles (state with highest consumption: Nevada, 49.9 gallons; lowest: Utah, 22.6 gallons)

Per capita age 21+ liquor consumption in Tennessee in 1999: 1.42 gallons (state with highest consumption: New Hampshire, 4.85 gallons; lowest: West Virginia, 1.04 gallons)

Per capita age 21+ wine consumption in Tennessee in 1998: 1.36 gallons (state with highest consumption: Nevada, 5.55 gallons; lowest: Mississippi, 0.83 gallons)

In 2002, the brewing industry contributed 650 jobs and $314,900,000 to the Tennessee economy.

Anheuser-Busch market share in Tennessee in 1999: 63.8 percent

Annual state tax on person or establishment engaging in retail sales of alcoholic beverages, wine or beer:
Private club * $300
Restaurant (75-125 seats) * $600
Premier type tourist resort * $1,500
Historic mansion house site * $300
Public aquarium * $300
Paddlewheel steamboat co.* $750

DWI—"Driving While Impaired"
A person with a BAC level of .08-.099% is considered to be legally impaired: consequences can include written and/or oral warnings and large fines. Repeated offenders may receive suspension of driver's license and possible jail time.

DUI—"Driving Under the Influence"
A person with a BAC level of .10% or higher, is considered to be legally intoxicated and can be charged with a DUI if found driving. Consequences can include large fines, suspension of driver's license, and jail time.

The saga of a city growing up with strong drink

by Jack Neely

Listening to old-timers talk about drinking in Knoxville can be misleading. Say a 21-year-old is out enjoying his first legal beer with his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

His 49-year-old dad would enjoy astonishing the kid by remembering that when he was a young man, he couldn't buy a martini or even a glass of wine in a Knoxville restaurant.

"Hell, that's nothing," the 69-year-old grandfather might add. "When I was 21, you couldn't buy liquor at all except from a bootlegger, and the only thing besides that was weak beer." Knoxville was half-proud of unverified claims that it was the largest dry city in America (outside of Utah, presumably).

And then the kid's 92-year-old great-grandfather might croak that when he turned 21, you couldn't buy anything with alcohol in it, not even a weak beer. Unless, of course, you knew somebody.

The conversation ends there, because there's no older generation to top him. If there were, the innocent might assume the old man would remember a time somehow more restrictive than those of the kid's parent, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

If fate allowed the kid's great-great-grandfather to join the conversation, the 120-year old codger would tell a different story. He wouldn't recall an even earlier level of even greater sobriety. He'd remember a time when Knoxville was regionally famous for its locally brewed beer, and the city supported over 100 saloons downtown alone. Alcohol has been freely legal for most of the city's history. It was, in fact, one of our first industries.

In the city's stormy first decade, when Knoxville was a territorial and then state capital, newcomers found it hard to ignore that the new city had several taverns, and still more bars, or "tippling houses," but no church building. Some believed it to be the only capital city in the world with that peculiar condition. Churches came along; bars remained. One 1798 visitor, by way of explaining apparent drunken behavior in the streets of downtown Knoxville, remarked that "Whiskey and peach brandy were cheap."

The production of liquor was a significant element in early Knoxville. Riverboatmen—before steamboats, traffic went only one way—would load up with Knoxville whiskey and float it two months downstream to a ready market in New Orleans, where they would live like kings. According to a census account, liquor was Knoxville's biggest industry in 1820; it was the handiest and most profitable way to dispose of your corn crop. That year, Knox County hosted 61 legal distilleries, which accounted for more than half of the manufacturing establishments in the county. Liquor remained one of Knoxville's chief products until the time of the Civil War.

It wasn't all for export. The history of Knoxville's antebellum bars is a little murky, but the better regarded ones were attached to hotels: among them were the Mansion House Saloon, which was located where the Courthouse is now, and the Lamar House Saloon, which was located where the Bistro is now. The site of business deals as well as disputes that ended with gunplay, the Bistro may be the best place in town to imagine what a Civil War-era saloon was like.

The French-speaking Swiss arrived around 1849, adding an exotic chapter to Knoxville's drinking history; by the mid-1850s, Knoxville's Swiss, especially one Frederick Esperandieu, had an impressive reputation for making wine from vineyards on the northeast side of town. Local wine was a feature of their religious Agape feasts in the countryside.

Meanwhile, German immigrants brought other traditions. Beginning probably shortly before the Civil War, the manufacture of beer grew at local breweries like Lucas Graf's ca. 1869 "Knoxville Brewery" along Second Creek, at the north end of what's now World's Fair Park. Paul Sturm ran the competing Union Brewery not far away.

Beer would be a booming industry in Knoxville over the next 40 years. Around 1885, the Knoxville Brewing Association built a rather large, castle-like brewery upstream from Graf's experiment near Mechanicsville, with a 2,100-foot-deep artesian well. At one time, its 40 employees were cranking out 25,000 barrels a year of "as prime a beverage as there is sold anywhere north or south."

Meanwhile, the Irish were leading and sustaining a great institution: the saloon. Many of the Irish settled in what was then called Irish Town, on the northeast side of downtown; several showed talent as bartenders. At one time, a large number of Knoxville's bartenders had names like Harrigan, Flannagan, Cassady, Cullinan, running joints with names like Red Mike's and the White Elephant. Among them was Patrick Sullivan, whose admirable ca. 1886 corner building still stands as the anchor of the Old City. Central Avenue became the city's most popular address for saloons. Of course, another minority member also took a decisive role in the development of saloons: Cal Johnson, raised to be a slave, made a small fortune on his chain of saloons which served both black and white patrons. The best known was the Lone Tree, on the 200 block of Gay Street.

Saloons typically offered a variety of ales and lagers; porter seems to have been a favorite. But they often offered other attractions: several employed pianists; others furnished pool tables, roulette wheels, or shooting or knife-throwing concessions; one was famous for its array of archaeological artifacts, including the petrified arm of a prehistoric giant. By 1907, there were about 114 Knoxville saloons of various reputations, most of them downtown.

They became gathering places for business deals and political discussions: the circumstantial evidence suggests they kept politics livelier, because elected offices seemed to turn over much more quickly: about four times as many citizens served in City Council during the saloon era as did in later eras.

They also became a port of entry for new tastes and pastimes. Saloons introduced seafood to Knoxville: fresh oysters, shipped in from the Chesapeake Bay daily by rail, were the favorite bar food during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Knoxville's first baseball league—it may have been Tennessee's first—was organized in one Gay Street saloon in 1865.

Of course, not all the effects of saloonery were salubrious. As the Irish became prosperous and moved to the new streetcar suburbs, Central catered to all the vices of working-class people, riverboatmen, and traveling salesmen. Known as the Bowery, it seemed to breed trouble. Nearly anything was available down there: drugs, prostitutes of either race, and bets over poker or billiards. At some Bowery drugstores, you could buy and snort cocaine right there, at the counter.

On the Bowery, murder became mundane, not always vigorously investigated. It didn't take much sleuthing to trace most of the trouble, directly or indirectly, to alcohol. Thanks partly to adventures on the Bowery, Knoxville suffered a high murder rate in the 1880s and '90s. A visiting YMCA progressive claimed Knoxville's Bowery was the most dangerous place in the South outside of New Orleans.

Knoxville's reputation for booze-fueled lawlessness may have been what drew several instructive visits from Frances Willard, the nation's leading temperance activist of the day. Temperance, which had its local roots in the 1830s, took a firmer grip, perhaps because of the influence of the expanding Bible Belt—or perhaps because alcohol was causing serious problems. It was a factor in several of Knoxville's highest-profile killings, like the murder of former Confederate Gen. James Clanton in 1871.

In 1887, the state passed the Pendleton Act, which banned the sale of alcohol within four miles of any school. Cities, including Knoxville, where nearly every such establishment was within four miles of a school, were exempted.

Some of it had to do with a guy who walked into Ike Jones' Saloon on the Bowery in December, 1901. Wild West train robber Harvey Logan, a.k.a. Kid Curry, was shooting pool until a couple of Knoxville policemen attempted to collar him, whereupon he started shooting cops, seriously wounding both, escaped, and was recaptured. Until his second, thorough escape, a year and a half later, Logan was Knoxville's most infamous citizen, a handy example of the danger that lurked in saloons. Knoxville's mayor at the time was the determinedly anti-prohibition Sam Heiskell. However, when he got up to speak before a prohibitionist crowd, the ladies would chant, Har-vey-Lo-gan. To ally yourself with alcohol was to invite comparisons to a murderous outlaw.

Charismatic young Nashville editor and politician Edward Carmack visited in early 1907, drawing a crowd of thousands to Market Square to hear something like a prohibitionist crusade. Citing figures that Knoxville men spent a million dollars on booze annually, Sentinel editor George Milton declared, "It is a sheer waste. You might as well pile up that one million here on Market Square and set fire to it."

The ladies waved white handkerchiefs and sang prohibition fight songs, one to the tune of "Dixie": "We'll drive saloons from Knoxville's border / And have a town of law and order / Get away...."

That year, state action on the 20-year-old Pendleton Act forced a charter-amendment reconsideration of the issue. Women "worked like Trojans at the polls." For them, it worked. The Knoxville man—who was estimated to take, on average, three drinks a day—voted his saloons out of business, almost two to one. Women were not allowed to vote (and were hardly allowed to drink), but one can only admire their organization.

Cherokee Country Club, which would long be a refuge for the well-heeled drinker, was founded the same year. It is, possibly, coincidental.

It wasn't the only private club in town, of course. The "market bar" James Agee describes in 1916 Knoxville in his book, A Death In the Family, is apparently a speakeasy. There were lots of them; unsuspecting downtown renovators turn one up now and then.

Knoxville's head start on prohibition gave it a head start in the bootlegging racket. By the time national prohibition clocked in in 1920, East Tennessee already had a black market in place. Local moonshine became a major commodity in major northern urban centers, like Chicago. "Thunder Road" persisted after national prohibition ended in 1933.

Legal beer returned to Knoxville, but wine and liquor remained off the table. One of the city's pioneer beer distributors, the Hartman Bros., became better known for experimenting with a new product, ostensibly a mixer for moonshine, called Mountain Dew.

Aided by the fact that it was located at the center of the nation's moonshine industry, Knoxville remained a leader in the national illegal liquor trade. In 1940, syndicated columnist Ernie Pyle noted that the nation's moonshine trade was centered in Cocke County, and that the largest part of it went from there to Knoxville.

Writer John Gunther perhaps wasn't seeing the whole picture when, in a best-selling 1947 book called Inside U.S.A., he called Knoxville "an extremely puritanical town" which "serves no alcohol stronger than 3.6 percent beer, and its more dignified taprooms close at 9:30 p.m."

In 1950, Knoxville's illegal-booze trade employed an estimated 200; one bootlegger estimated that Knoxvillians drank 1,200 illegal fifths a day—that is, of bootlegged stamped liquor, not counting moonshine.

"Progressives" had once been the prohibitionists. But after 1933, the legal-liquor people called themselves "progressives." Each decade brought a new referendum to legalize alcohol. Each decade it failed. Finally, in 1961, Knoxville voters passed a law to allow sales of liquor and wine in package stores, but not in bars and restaurants. The vote varied widely by precinct; the county, outside of the city, voted dry, as did the northern parts of the city. The wettest ward was Sequoyah Hills, which voted 10-1 for legal liquor. It passed by exactly 4,444 votes.

However, it wasn't until 1972, when liquor-by-the-drink passed by about a three-to-two margin, that Knoxville alcohol was roughly as free as it had been in 1907.

The city's 65-year experiment with various forms of prohibition were annoying to the drinker, but to give the temperance ladies their due, those years saw an astonishing diminution in the city's murder rate which is, today, about an eighth as high as it was in the 1880s and '90s. But with re-legalized liquor, saloon-era murder rates have not returned. Maybe, at long last, we've grown up.