Knoxville’s Urban Wilderness is a 1,000-acre outdoor playground just minutes from downtown, perfect for adventures year-round. Whether you’re into paddling calm waters, chasing adrenaline on mountain bike trails, or simply exploring nature with the family, you’ll find your perfect fit here. To make…
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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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Tucked just beyond the heart of downtown Knoxville but still a part of the buzz, the Old City invites you to look closer and immerse yourself in one of East Tennessee’s most character-rich neighborhoods. You’ll find 100+ year-old original brick pavers down Jackson Avenue, historic warehouses turned…
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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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Blount Mansion Each year, the Historic House Museums of Knoxville celebrate Statehood Day by inviting the public into the hallowed halls of their stately manners, antebellum mansions, and frontier fortifications to experience the stories of those who lived there firsthand. Visit the following sites…
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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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