Country music has never been more popular than it is now, thanks to several current figures who had their starts in or near Knoxville, from Dolly Parton to Kenny Chesney to Kelsea Ballerini. But the national country-music phenomenon has much deeper roots, with a dramatic story that unfolded in…
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Maybe Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell never lived here, though they did both work with a future UT scientific scholar Brown Ayres, honoree of Ayres Hall, early in his career. Still, for at least 150 years, the city has seen its share of innovative thinkers. One of the most celebrated in…
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When did Knoxvillians start drinking coffee? It’s always fun to see how Knoxvillians first responded to things we now take for granted: football, pizza, opera, steamboats, bluegrass, soft drinks, Halloween, beer, etc. We can’t do that for coffee. Coffee was always here. And that fact is surprising…
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When did Knoxville become known for ice cream? Ice cream has become one of downtown’s reliable attractions, and Knoxville has several fine ice-cream makers, some of which are so notably famous they form lines on the sidewalk on a summer day, but none of them more authentically old-fashioned than…
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We take World’s Fair Park for granted, as a venue for concerts and festivals, but next time you’re down there, have a look around. There may be nowhere like it in the world. It’s a pretty extraordinary assemblage of more than a century’s worth of architecture, from mid-Victorian industrial to some…
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Basketball Begins In Knoxville in 2025, as tens of thousands of orange-clad fans cheer both men’s and women’s games, it’s hard to imagine an era without basketball . But for the first half of the nation’s history, it didn’t exist in any form. Many 19th-century Americans, from General Grant to Emily…
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Tough, well-trapped, and cantankerous: Knoxville’s Historic Holston Hills Golf Course The site of this month’s Visit Knoxville Open is one of the most beautiful golf courses in the region, on the banks of the Holston River. Now almost a century old, Holston Hills is also one of the most historic…
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In and around Knoxville is an array of photogenic historic homes, houses noted for their age, architecture, and stories of the people who lived there. No two are very much alike. Some have been known and respected as house museums for almost a century, while another is a relatively recent addition…
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This April marks the 160 th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. By the time Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in a meeting more than 300 miles northeast of here at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, things had been pretty quiet in Knoxville for more than a year. Longstreet’s…
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After 150 years of envying the Gulf Coast Mardi Gras, we finally created our own version of it—and brought the dogs! Mardi Growl’s history is pretty recent and easy to track. Inspired by a similar event in St. Louis, it started in 2008, and has been a colorful, popular, and often a joyfully noisy…
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