| Boom Town
Smoldering dynamite and the wrath of a dead white circus mule
by Jack Neely
It was one of those weekends that got folks talking about the hoodoo.
At Knoxville General Hospital, a middle-aged Englishman died. His name was John Hodgson, and he'd lived here since he was about 17. His mother had died 35 years ago; his brother and sister had moved away some time back.
The Knoxville Sentinel, 95 years ago this week,remembered Hodgson as "a man of genial disposition, in spite of his wretchedness at times." A few could recall when Hodgson had been bartender at the old Lamar House Saloon. Lately he'd been a carpenter who lived job-to-job, and on gifts from his sister, who was famous. He lived in a one-room shack, they said, because he spent most of his money on liquor.
His sister was novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett, the popular author of The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Contacted at her home in Washington, she said they should bury John at Old Gray, where their mother was buried.
Downtown, Professor J.J. Johnson, "German clairvoyant and astrologist," entertained visitors at his townhouse on Commerce, a block north of Market Square. He apparently wasn't the sort of clairvoyant who talked about hoodoos. If he predicted what would happen around the corner that weekend, it didn't make the papers.
After all, it was a relatively quiet November, so far. Most of the crime was on the order of selling liquor on Sundays, a weekly thing. The sheriff busted the third-floor gambling den above the White Elephant Saloon on Union near Gay. He smashed up both the roulette wheels and even the fine pool table, and dumped it all out the window. Then he burned it all in a bonfire right there on the street, just as an example.
Not far away, at W.W. Woodruff's hardware store on Gay, the big new thing was the modern, 20th-century stove, known as the Quick-Meal Range, at $22.50 and up. You could buy nearly anything there. Captain Woodruff, the 64-year-old Union veteran from Kentucky, made sure of that: furniture, kitchen appliances, tools, guns, he had it all. As you walked in his door, in fact, you walked past two large caskets of dynamite.
The day of John Hodgson's burial had been an unusually quiet Friday; Staub's Theater was between vaudeville shows. A few alumni were looking forward to UT's game against Clemson tomorrow, out at the old baseball field on Asylum Avenue, but they weren't expecting much of a crowd. Saturday was mainly Bargain Day at several stores downtown.
It was about 2:30 in the morning. Plumber James Dinwiddie and police officer Dan Leahy were chatting casually in front of the Third National Bank on Gay Street. They bade each other goodnight. Dinwiddie walked north on Gay, as Leahy went south. Dinwiddie was the one who noticed the Woodruff's building was on fire.
He shouted to Officer Leahy, who tried to ring up the fire department on a nearby telephone, but couldn't get through. Meanwhile, a passerby, a black man, heard about the emergency and sprinted to the station on Commerce Street.
In minutes, firefighters were on the scene in horsedrawn fire wagons, but already "an angry flame sprang through the front of the building, carrying with it the heavy plate glass and window frames."
They trained four streams of water onto the fire. It didn't take them long to realize the biggest problem might be those dynamite magazines out front. One was already smoldering. Firemen attached ropes to the other box and hauled it safely away from the fire. Asked later about how they dared to do it, one fireman later explained, "We didn't have time to think."
The other box was still smoldering. "A blue blaze arched out and around the box," recalled a witness. "Then there was a hissing and a noise sounding like sping, followed by a deafening report."
The explosion knocked everyone from their feet. It hurled one young man through a plate-glass window. At Lieber Brothers Clothing, Eli Lieber, fearful to leave his shop across the street, was injured when a large showcase crashed on him.
One man watched his derby hat launch from his head and disappear into the cloudy sky. A block and a half away, at the Hotel Imperial, New Orleans businessman R.O. Jones had just opened his door to greet a bellhop when the concussion knocked him flat.
Prize-winning sprinter Billy Hicks was on the street when it happened. He ran away down Gay Street at his best street-shoe speed: 100 yards in 10 seconds, he estimated. As he ran, a young stranger loped right by him, at a speed Hicks thought impossible for humans.
The explosion woke up sleepers on Black Oak Ridge, north of Fountain City. It broke all the strings inside the pianos at the Cable Piano Store.
In all, 22 were injured, a couple of them seriously. Firefighter John Hawkins had his leg broken at the hip; doctors feared he was crippled for life. Police Sgt. William Dinwiddie, not wholly recovered from being shot by the outlaw Kid Curry three years earlier, was "shocked and benumbed" on his right side. A couple, including firefighter Joe Cruze, had eardrums ruptured. Fire chief Sam Boyd suffered a head injury. The strangest injury was that of Thomas Duncan, whose thigh injury looked to doctors so much like a gunshot wound that it was at first reported as such. They later decided the "bullet" was debris flung by the explosion.
The fire burned into the night. In all, there was almost $500,000 in damage, though that didn't compare with the fatal Million-Dollar Fire of just seven years ago, Knoxville's most costly fire in history. It had leveled this same block.
This was, in fact, the third big fire on this block in recent memory. Headlined as the Burned District, it got some old-timers recalling the hoodoo. Two days later, when the Lawson-McGhee Library building burned, in clear view a couple of blocks down the same sidewalk, many downtowners were pretty sure what the matter was.
See, back in the 1860s and '70s, before this part of Gay Street had commercial buildings on it, the circus used to camp here. Some remembered the year that one particular pack animal traveling with the circus had died on this spot. The deceased animal was, in fact, a rare white mule.
"Now, as everyone knows," the Sentinel explained, "the place where a white mule dies is ever after noted for the misfortunes that happened on that spot, so it really is wonderful that so few casualties have resulted. Evidently the thing to do is to get some really scientific 'hoodoo man' or 'conjure doctor' to exorcise the spirit. Persons owning the property need then have no fear of rebuilding."
There were a few conjure doctors in town, sure enough, living along the river and creeks of downtown Knoxville. We don't know if Capt. Woodruff might have invited any of them in for a little business meeting.
W.W. Woodruff, the old Union soldier from Kentucky, rebuilt, a building bigger but plainer, more modern than before. He was so weary of disasters, though, that he washed his hands of the business, and let his son run the place. In the rebuilt building, Woodruff's remained in business for 88 more years.
The building Capt. Woodruff rebuilt on this once-hoodooed ground is the one we all know as the Great Southern brewpub.
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