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 spectacle, delighting dogs of all sizes, shapes, and colors, as well as a certain number of humans. Originally held on the streets of downtown Knoxville, concentrated in Market Square, the festival outgrew that space, and in recent years it’s been held in World’s Fair Bark. Or Park, that is.
However, the story of Knoxville and Mardi Gras goes way back.
The city has some notable New Orleans connections to begin with. William Charles Cole Claiborne (1774?-1817), the youngest signer of the Tennessee Constitution in downtown Knoxville in 1796, became, just after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the first U.S. governor of the Territory of Orleans (1803-1812), and then of the new State of Louisiana (1812-1816), and especially well-known in New Orleans, where he learned to get along with the French and Spanish authorities and their customs. Mardi Gras was not a big deal when he lived in New Orleans, but he was likely invited to a party or two. Claiborne Avenue, still the Big Easy’s longest street, and Claiborne County, Tenn., are over 600 miles apart, but named for the same guy.
David Glasgow Farragut grew up in both Knox County and New Orleans, where his Spanish-speaking father was recruited to help with the U.S. administration. He surely knew about Mardi Gras, though the big street parties commenced after he went to sea.
We can hardly guess how many East Tennesseans wound up in New Orleans; in fact, some historians have proposed that it was flatboaters from upriver, including Tennessee, many of them taking the long, circuitous river trip to sell liquor, who took New Orleans’ once-exclusive parties to the streets in the early 1800s. Their rowdy parades made fun of the earlier genteel Shrove Tuesday celebrations held in private courtyards where these rivermen were rarely welcome.
Mardi Gras became annual news in Memphis, where both steamboats and passenger trains advertised annual Mardi Gras trips to New Orleans. Memphis, New Orleans' upriver cousin, began hosting its own Mardi Gras, which was for a few years perhaps the biggest party in Tennessee.
To Knoxvillians, it was only a curiosity in the news. Mardi Gras was a Catholic holiday, and though Knoxville had a growing Catholic population, most of them were of Irish and German heritage, and didn’t celebrate Shrove Tuesday in any way comparable to the Spanish and French Mardi Gras.
An odd, short-lived pro-secessionist newspaper called The Southern Citizen—edited by eccentric John Mitchel, a recent Irish immigrant who lived in Knoxville for only three or four years—carried what may have been Tennessee’s first detailed description of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It was in 1858, the year after New Orleans’ first big public street parades: “The day first appeared in the form of grotesque maskers at the street corners, with pockets of flour,” went the account, in part. It’s not clear whether Mitchel himself wrote it, but it sounds like a firsthand account. “The boys carried sticks and wore their coats wrong side out …”
Only after the Civil War did Mardi Gras grow from a regional curiosity to a national obsession. Adding to the excitement in 1872, was the rare presence of Prince Alexis, son of Tsar Alexander II, who went to New Orleans to witness the festivities. It seems as if that year was the tipping point when America knew, every year, that it was Mardi Gras. The following year, W.F. Yardley, the well-known Black attorney and politician from Knoxville, attended Memphis’s Mardi Gras. Some Knoxville papers made fun of the Memphis festival, likening it to that city’s notorious yellow fever epidemics. But for a decade or so their party was a big deal that aspired to compete with New Orleans and Mobile.
By 1873, railroads were advertising trips to Mardi Gras in Knoxville newspapers. Knoxvillians would take the train to Atlanta and then board an express for Mobile or New Orleans; those who could afford it favored Pullman’s Palace Sleeping Cars. Although it was a trip of almost 24 hours, it was probably a more pleasant trip than any way to make that journey today. According to bold-type ads in Knoxville papers, it was a “Grand Excursion Trip … that no one should fail to take.”
There were attempts to start local Mardi Gras celebrations in several envious American cities, including Galveston and St. Louis. Even Nashville gave it a shot, at least briefly. It’s not clear there was ever a coordinated effort in that regard in Knoxville, but it’s interesting that during the same period that Mardi Gras was spreading, masked revelry was becoming a popular way to party even here.
By the 1870s, Masquerade balls—or “Bal Masques,” often with literary or mythological themes, like those of Mardi Gras--became very popular here in hotels like the Lamar House, the current location of the Bijou Theatre and the Bistro at the Bijou.
Mardi Gras seems to have inspired lots of unrelated celebrations in Knoxville over the generations. In 1921, for example, something called “Mardi Gras” was held in Chilhowee Park, claiming to be one of the biggest parties in Knoxville history—but the fact that it was held in September may undermine its authenticity. The American Legion held a Christmas party in 1935 with a Mardi Gras theme. In 1938, UT students staged a faux Mardi Gras party.
For half a century at the Knoxville train stations, railroads kept advertising Mardi Gras travel deals to the real thing in New Orleans and Mobile. Some Knoxvillians splurged and went all the way to Havana, which enjoyed its own creditable version of Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras mania lasted here until about 1927. That year, a Southern Railway agent remarked that Knoxville had been going to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for so long that people were beginning to tire of it. “The citizen has so much to do and see and so many places to go most any time nowadays, that these events don’t stand out as something to look forward to as they once did,” he remarked. He expected only 25 Knoxville Mardi Gras revelers on the Southern line that year.
For some decades after that, Knoxvillians traveled for Mardi Gras, mainly in cars or airplanes. Most didn’t think much about it, but probably knew enough about it to enjoy the joke when Abbott and Costello Go to Mars opened at the Riviera in 1953. (The boys take an accidental rocket flight and land in New Orleans, convinced it’s another planet.)
The prospect of a Knoxville Mardi Gras revived in 1989 as a fundraiser for the cooperative charity Community Shares. In the Candy Factory—now a mostly residential building on World’s Fair Park—the featured performer at that first Community Shares Mardi Gras was then-young Zydeco performer Terrance Simien, later a nationally known Grammy winner. Eventually the charity promoted the event with a Mardi parade of floats and strewn treats in downtown Knoxville. It was fun, and for a dozen years or so it often drew several hundred revelers, but didn’t become a tradition.
But then, without warning, here came Mardi Growl, romping in as Knoxville’s most durable celebration of a Gulf Coast phenomenon. So Knoxville’s biggest and most durable celebration is mainly about dogs.
Astute historians of the future may well note Mardi Growl as part of Knoxville’s early 21st-century efforts to make the city dog-friendly.
Through most of the 20th century, dogs were rarely seen downtown, any time of year. You hardly ever see them in old photographs. Even as late as the 1980s, walking a dog on a downtown sidewalk was a sure sign of extreme eccentricity. But as the city began to promote more residential development downtown, it made sense that the business district should become as pet-friendly as any suburb, if not more so. Stores began carrying dog supplies. Restaurants began offering accommodations for well-behaved dogs. And in late 2007, citizens began organizing an effort to create a downtown dog park in an unused green space at the southeast corner of Summit Hill Drive and Central Street, near the Old City.
That dog park was, in fact, the subject of the very first Mardi Growl—it was a benefit for that prospective dog park. The biggest sponsor turned out to be PetSafe, the invisible-fence company. But long after the park was a reality, Mardi Growl was still roaring, seemingly bigger every year. It’s now a benefit for the Young Williams Animal Center, which finds homes for abandoned pets.
So it’s true, Mardi Growl, this rare convention of costumed canines, is definitely the biggest-ever local version of what’s arguably America’s biggest and wildest annual party—now on the site of the 1982 World’s Fair. To our best memory, the big Fair didn’t allow dogs, so they may see this as a sort of revenge.
Laissez Bon Temps Rouler! Or make that Bone Temps, as participants may prefer.
Images / Captions
William Charles Cole Claiborne (1774?-1817). (Wikipedia.)
Jack is the Executive Director of the Knoxville History Project, an educational nonprofit whose mission is to research and promote the history of Knoxville. He is a journalist who has been writing about his hometown’s character and heritage for many years. He has written several books about Knoxville and its history, and they can be purchased in various places throughout the city including Union Avenue Books and the Visit Knoxville Gift Shop.
