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The library, and the woman

by Jack Neely

Until this summer, it looked as if the most controversial issue concerning the new main library would be whether it would be named “Lawson McGhee,” as have all of Knoxville’s main libraries for the last 119 years.

That name, like McGhee Tyson, has long been misunderstood. Some decades ago, there was a tendency to hyphenate it, as if it were a combination of the last names of two wealthy benefactors. There’s a big oil portrait of Col. Charles McClung McGhee hanging near the front, by the French artist Benjamin Constant. Born on one of the few big plantations in East Tennessee, McGhee grew up rich, with a 15,000-acre yard along the Little Tennessee. He attended the local university and married well, to Isabella White, great-granddaughter of James White, the founder of Knoxville. She died the year after their wedding, and he turned to the handiest option, her sister Cornelia, and married her. By the time of the Civil War, they had five children. During the war, McGhee was a Confederate officer with a desk job in the commissary department.

After the war, McGhee did well for himself in the rapidly growing city, as a banker and railroad man, earning a place for himself as Knoxville’s resident tycoon. He lived in a big Victorian mansion on Locust Street, right at the end of Union, a two-block walk from Market Square.

That’s Col. McGhee. Library patrons who see his portrait have been known to ask, “Where’s Col. Lawson?”

Lawson wasn’t another bewhiskered old philanthropist; Lawson was a very young woman. She was Charles McClung McGhee’s daughter. We don’t know very much about her personally beyond what’s in her obituary, which appeared in the Knoxville Chronicle about 50 years earlier than her father would have liked.

She was born just before the Civil War. Her first name was May, but she apparently preferred her middle name, Lawson, derived from an ancestor: it was James White’s wife’s maiden name.

There’s a painting of her, too, in the library, hanging on the second floor above the spiral staircase. It’s a modern and somewhat idealized portrait, taken from a rare photo. Lawson McGhee wasn’t necessarily a beauty—her father wasn’t either, for that matter—but, as her obituary had it, “Her refined and charming manners and amiable disposition made her a favorite, and she was greatly beloved by a wide circle of friends.” She did charity work, teaching at the St. Luke’s Mission Chapel on the east side of town, “taking the same interest in the poorest” as she did in others.

At 21 she married a Nashville man, David Shelby Williams. Lawson and her father had spent much of their lives in New York, and it was there that they held her wedding, on Oct. 20, 1881.

Williams moved to Knoxville to live with her. Within a year of their wedding Lawson McGhee Williams was pregnant. She gave birth in March 1883, to a daughter, whom they named Lawson McGhee Williams, after her mother.

But it didn’t go well. Lawson McGhee died on the morning of Wednesday, March 28, three weeks after giving birth. She was 23 years old. “It was not strange...that one of such sweet Christian faith and character should meet the summons of the Master without a fear,” went the Chronicle obituary, “but calmly and peacefully as a child responding to the call of a loving parent.”

Her child died a few weeks later. The Gilded Age was a charming, complex, and sometimes horrible time to be alive. Mother and infant daughter were buried in the McGhee family plot at Old Gray. It’s a place of impressive, sometimes grandiose memorials, but Lawson McGhee was buried without a stone to mark the spot. The story goes that Col. McGhee couldn’t bear to see it. He wanted to remember his daughter in a different way than a carved chunk of marble in a graveyard.

In 1885, he responded to what was in Knoxville a need often pleaded: a public library. McGhee donated funds to establish it. He constructed a three-story building on the corner of Gay Street and Vine, for $40,000—or $50,000—sources disagree. Adjusted for inflation, the figure would be something over a million dollars.

It looked less like a library than a standard Victorian commercial building. In those days before public support of libraries, McGhee ordered that the first floor be devoted to business, which would support the library. Even that wasn’t enough, though; the first permanent public library was subscription-based: there was a fee involved.

Lawson McGhee Library remained there until damaged by a fire in 1904, the year a series of fires between Jackson and Union Avenues convinced some that there was a hoodoo on Gay Street. It moved into a house on Market, near Commerce, and the original building was sold to Fiorenzo Rebori, the Italian confectioner whose shack stood beside it. It became better known as the Rebori Building. It’s still standing on Gay Street, recently remodeled as the townhouse of Jim and Jo Mason.

In 1917, the library moved into a handsome new marble-faced library opened nearby, on Commerce. (Now on the site of the TVA complex, it’s hard to point to its precise spot.) Col. McGhee had died years before, but the city chose to revive the name Lawson McGhee, this time finding funds to allow it to be, for the first time, a free library.

It kept the name when the main public library moved into new quarters on Church Avenue in 1971.

Soon after Col. McGhee’s death in 1907, the Freemasons acquired his house on Locust and radically remodeled it, simplified and consolidated its Victorian flourishes, for new use as their secretive temple, a purpose it has served ever since.

The McGhee family was civic-minded, prolifically generous, and insistent about permanently memorializing its children whose lives ended too early. Lawson’s sister, Betty, married army officer Lawrence Tyson. Many years after Col. McGhee established Lawson McGhee Library, she established Tyson Park, and in the deal assured that Knoxville’s airport should be named forever for her son, McGhee Tyson. He wasn’t much older than first cousin Lawson McGhee when he was killed in a plane crash in the North Sea in World War I.

Today, it’s uncertain whether the new library will be built at all—and, if it is, whether it will be named for Lawson McGhee. If new private donors step forward, they might well want their own name on it.

Col. McGhee’s famous declaration that in making the donation in 1885, “the principal conditions were that the library established should be called forever the Lawson McGhee Library” is still embossed in bronze in the Church Street foyer of Lawson McGhee.

Whether it’s still the same library Col. McGhee established, and whether the fact that it’s now a county system not just for Knoxvillians disengages McGhee’s original wishes, is up to the lawyers.

If the name is removed, we may feel obliged to find the grave Col. McGhee didn’t want to mark, and put something there, just so we’ll have some way to remember the devout young teacher who was also, briefly, a mother.

July 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 31 © 2004 Metro Pulse