Comment on this story

The evening Knoxvillians got a whiff of something new

by Jack Neely

On the first Friday evening that December, some unknown number of Knoxvillians were gathered in the widow Humes’ ballroom on dark Gay Street, finding humor in unlikely things, feeling dizzy and numb, discovering profound insights about the world around them and perhaps wondering if their hands were still attached to their arms.

It wasn’t like there was much else to do here on a Friday evening in 1823. Knoxville was stranded on top of its hill, abandoned by progress. Riverboats were changing Middle and West Tennessee, spreading industry and wealth. Not to Knoxville. Hemmed in by mountains and accessible mainly by horseback, the former state capital was growing more isolated than it had ever been. Once the young state’s banking and political center, once the only Tennessee town indicated on national maps, Knoxville had become just a hamlet of maybe 1,200 people living close together on the top of a small bluff overlooking the river.

The big excitement of the fall was Gen. Andrew Jackson’s visit two weeks ago. Jackson had been a familiar character in town 20 years earlier and as a young circuit judge had practically lived here at times, but now he was a national figure, the Hero of New Orleans, and the worthy subject of a round of toasts. Knoxvillians toasted Jackson (“He neither seeks, nor declines, official responsibility!”) and nearly everything else they could think of, including revolution-torn Greece (“The spirit of Leonidas will restore her ancient splendor!”). They toasted the democratic movement in South America, the veterans of the War of 1812, and women in general. They toasted so much, perhaps, because the alternative to toasting was walking home alone and sobering on the dark silent streets.

But the party did have to end, and then we were left to ourselves. One Knoxvillian who understood the need for a good House of Entertainment was Joseph Jackson, apparently no relation to the general. He’d just moved his public house into the new Knoxville Hotel, which some still called Humes’s.

More than 80 years before people yet unborn would build a theater on the back of it and call it the Bijou, the three-story brick building on the southwest corner of Gay and Cumberland, near the courthouse, was probably the most impressive edifice in town. Sometimes described as the largest building in East Tennessee at the time, it boasted “thirteen spacious rooms” for guests, plus a bar room, a dining room, and a ballroom, with two fireplaces each.

Built near the end of state-capital days, the building’s original owner was prosperous Irish immigrant Thomas Humes, who was still a young man when he died as it was finished, leaving his pretty widow, Margaret Humes, in charge of it. A willful woman with a magnetic personality, she was still, in middle age, a woman who could turn a man’s head. She still had gentleman callers. Mrs. Humes advertised the building aggressively, and let it out to one Archibald Rhea, who ran it as a hotel and a place of “public entertainment,” hosting balls, a dancing school, and occasional singing concerts. Rhea got out of the hotel business, though, and Mrs. Humes ran it until she found another tenant, Joseph Jackson.

The day that Jackson announced that his hotel, which had previously been on Main Street, was reopening in the Humes building, that same corner edifice hosted an unusual event. Or, at least, it seems unusual to us. It was advertised in the Register as casually as if it had been another land auction. The announcement appeared at the top of a column on page three of the Register, the weekly paper run by young publisher Frederick Heiskell. Originally from Maryland, Heiskell had literary ambitions, and maybe it’s not surprising that the first issue of the Knoxville Register ran, on the front page, a new poem by the young Massachusetts writer William Cullen Bryant.

Most of the issue was more prosaic, much about wholesalers and land auctions. But on page three, a few inches above an ad for a runaway slave named Peter, was the peculiar headline:

Exhilarating Gas.

The words that followed went on to explain, but not nearly enough: “By the solicitation of a number of gentlemen, the NITROUS OXIDE or EXHILARATING GAS will be administered THIS EVENING, December 5, at Humes’ Ball Room.”

If you look through enough old newspapers, you get used to seeing some surprising things, and they don’t surprise you anymore. The bootleg moonshine houses that used to be all over town, the cocaine shops that were down on Central a century ago. The bordellos and gambling dens and saloons with private wine rooms. They all fold into the history of this place. But sometimes the researcher sees something he hadn’t pictured and can only stare dumbly. Some 60 years before philosopher William James startled his colleagues with a paper about his personal experiments with nitrous oxide, random passersby were enjoying it on Gay Street. Unfortunately for us, those sponsors of the nitrous-oxide party aren’t named. Nor was the means by which it was distributed. But the soiree was apparently regarded as a family affair. The ad proceeds, “Tickets 50 cents; Children half price; to be had at Messrs. Jackson and Boyd’s bars.” Two silver quarters if you’re this high. Just one if you’re a kid.

There was no description of the event after it happened. No description of how the nitrous oxide was conveyed for the Knoxvillians’ enjoyment, or where it came from, though it’s likely that the doctors and dentists who rented rooms in the building for their practice had something to do with it.

We can only assume that on Saturday morning, Knoxvillians went back to life as usual, cockfights and quarter-horse races and liquor in public houses and politics. Joseph Jackson ran his place until he was bought out in 1837, but it kept its bar room through most of the 19th century. The building still has a good one today, called the Bistro, but Exhilarating Gas is no longer on the menu. Maybe you have to know somebody.

December 2, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 49 © 2004 Metro Pulse