Metro Pulse/Secret History/Burlington (n.)

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The obscure nomenclature of an East Knoxville neighborhood

by Jack Neely

Within Knoxville's history are a great many mysteries, and this one has me stumped.

About three miles deep into East Knoxville, just south of Chilhowee Park, is a distinctive old section of town. It is called, for reasons obscure, Burlington.

The movie theater is long gone. Ruby's, one of those old-line coffee shops you figured would be open forever, closed a couple of years ago. Recently Burlington almost lost its firehall. Several of the old buildings are boarded up.

Even when it's not pretty, though, Burlington survives as an interesting and sometimes lively place, one of only a handful of communities in Knox County that has something like an old-fashioned downtown: a dense cluster of brick buildings connected by sidewalks. Several businesses hang on in Burlington, including a used-furniture store, an A.M.E. church, a bar, a mortuary, a couple of barber shops, a couple of bail bondsmen, a fish market, a daily flea market, and a couple of restaurants, including Lema's, which is as far as I know Knoxville's only all-chitlin restaurant. Burlington stands out demographically: Here as in nowhere else in Knox County do blacks and whites coexist in nearly equal numbers.

Burlington was once home to Cal Johnson's racetrack, our chief center for horseracing a century ago. The first airplane to visit Knoxville landed on the infield in 1910. It's a historical place.

Part of what makes Burlington so concentrated and distinct has to do with the strips of steel that push upward through the worn asphalt. Burlington once had a place of honor as the eastern anchor of the streetcar line. Knoxville's very first electric trolley came out here in 1890, and for the next 57 years, Burlington was a destination for Knoxvillians on their days off, bound for Chilhowee Park or the racetrack.

By 1915, several businesses were named for Burlington: the Burlington Barber Shop, the Burlington Drug Co., the Burlington Milk Depot. Who, or what, were they all celebrating with their names?

It's an English name. And in English fashion, the old-timers tend to elide it into something like Burltn. (If you pronounce the ing, you might as well wear a nametag that says VISITOR.)

Did the Earl of Burlington come here to establish a utopian community for the unlanded gentry? Or was one of Cal Johnson's prize racehorses named Burlington?

Well, it's easy to eliminate any connection to the coat factory. It was founded in the 1970s, and named for Burlington, NJ. Several states host incorporated Burlingtons. One is in North Carolina: a town of 45,000 that boasts of being the Hosiery Center of the South. It was named, and developed, in the 1880s. Burlington Industries was named for Burlington, N.C.

I wondered whether Burlington must have had a factory here, and set up a neighborhood named for the company, like Alcoa.

But I couldn't find evidence that any such concern was ever located here. Moreover, Burlington is listed as a "Northeastern Suburb" of Knoxville in 1913—a decade before N.C.'s Burlington Industries was founded.

That founding date in itself seemed like a clue. The year 1913, the first year the word "Burlington" shows up in Knoxville's city directories, was the biggest year in the history of this neighborhood. It was the year of the National Conservation Exposition, held across the street at Chilhowee Park. People came from all over the country—one million of them, in all—to see the Titanic exhibit, the motorcycle races, the wireless telegraph, the impressionist art exhibit, the Wild West Show.

Maybe the fair had something to do with the name. But no one named Burlington was associated with it. You can spend a lot of time studying Knoxville history and find no Burlingtons. It's a name almost unknown even in the censuses. There was, briefly, an instructor at UT named Walter Burlington, but he didn't arrive until after the establishment of Burlington.

When the library fails you, try the barber shops. I figured that if anybody in the world knew where the name came from, it would be the old men who spend their days in the cool of Barnes' Barber Shop on MLK, in the heart of Burlington. The afternoon I dropped in, there were two elderly barbers and a roomful of waiting customers. One of the barbers, Roy, didn't even have to confer with his colleague and customers. "We don't have any idea," he said. "We've been trying to figure it out for a long time. All I can figure is that it's an old family name." He mentioned the disappointing possibility that it may not mean anything at all.

Of course, it could just be a euphonious fiction, as some newer neighborhoods are. Maybe, 90 years hence, a naive columnist working on the history of the late-20th-century neighborhoods of West Knoxville will frustrate himself trying to locate the origins of Kensington, Whittington, Barrington, Carrington, etc. By pioneering that swanky and vaguely English suffix -ington, did modest Burlington start a trend?