About six miles south of downtown Knoxville, Marble Springs is a bucolic idyll, a cluster of very old cabins in a creekside glade, surrounded by woods. It’s unlike most historic homes in that the touring is mostly outside, peering into four historic cabins arranged in a compound. It’s a good place for a picnic.
Although it’s one of Knoxville’s oldest historic sites—historians say John Sevier, already famous as a Revolutionary War hero but not yet Tennessee’s first governor—acquired several hundred acres in this vicinity back in 1790, before Knoxville was even a city—the particular plot of 35 acres was not fully open to the public until the 1960s. Why it took so long makes an interesting story about our short attention spans and our shifting impressions of history.
John Sevier, who lived here with his wife, Bonnie Kate, died at age 70 in 1815. Admired in his own time for protecting settlers of the region, sometimes with aggressive and punitive tactics against the Cherokees and the more militant Chickamaugans, he was as an old man a civilian U.S. congressman, a less dangerous and dynamic figure. After his death, he likely seemed irrelevant in a new age of steam transportation, when the Indians were defeated and far away.
It's not completely clear how much time he spent at Marble Springs, a rustic and remote residence for a governor, even in his time. He had a very large family, 18 children by two wives, but by the time he died, most of them had grown and moved away from East Tennessee. After his death, even his aging widow, Bonnie Kate, left the area. No one was around to maintain his legacy, or his farm, which was sold, an obscure and remote patch of land owned by a couple of different farmers in the generation after the Seviers were gone.
By the mid-1800s, his name was known mainly to history nerds, and Marble Springs was mostly unknown, and remained off the radar, even to most Tennesseans, for 150 years. But some of those history nerds changed the way we thought about John Sevier, and raised the profile of his former home. The first was probably J.G.M. Ramsey, Tennessee’s first very comprehensive history, originally published in 1853. It included what was the first widely read description of Marble Springs. He described “the ruins of an old station, now in a deserted and worn-out field,” with “a beautiful spring, surrounded by a hilly and rocky country. In this secluded spot stood the cabin of Governor Sevier. He enlarged the building, and made it, if not commodious and elegant, convenient and comfortable…”
He may have been speaking from memory. Ramsey lived in East Knox County, seven or eight miles from Marble Springs, and probably knew John Sevier, who died when Ramsey was 18. Ramsey’s father was a Sevier associate. As he described it in 1853, Sevier’s compound was already in “ruins,” which is remarkable because it doesn’t look like that today, 170 years later. Ramsey doesn’t mention that it was part of the farm of a well-known and eventually prosperous farmer named George Kirby. His farm was so productive that by the time of the Civil War, he was well known on Market 
Square in downtown Knoxville, as one of the region’s most successful growers of tomatoes and pumpkins. He also had a small dairy operation, and some wealthy Knoxvillians insisted on Kirby’s butter. Kirby lived simply, and by some accounts his sleeping quarters were in a log building that had been Sevier’s kitchen. Ramsey’s account was interesting enough to be quoted in the New York Citizen in 1855, and may have prompted a brief stir in the Tennessee legislature to erect a statue of Sevier, but nothing came of it.
Years later, seemingly out of nowhere, a young Knoxville attorney named William A. Henderson gave a lecture in 1873 about the legacy of John Sevier, whom he considered an unjustly forgotten hero. It became an obsession of sorts; he gave similar talks over a period of about 15 years. Henderson didn’t emphasize Marble Springs, and whatever remained of it, but he caused a bit of a stir that may have contributed to what happened next.
One peculiar detail about Tennessee’s first governor, something maybe unique among American governors, is that nobody in Tennessee seemed to know where he was buried. As a congressman on a postwar surveying expedition in 1815, he had died in the wilderness along the Coosa River. Just as Henderson was extoling Sevier’s virtues to surprised crowds in Knoxville, a couple of lawyers in Alabama were connecting dots. They identified the grave of “J. Sevier” in an untilled spot in the middle of an Alabama cotton field. Word of it got around in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, up in Boston, an erratic editor who had previously been associated with the Lincoln administration wrote a book-length biography of Sevier, called John Sevier: Commonwealth Builder. It was a romantic piece of work that seemed to crib from Ramsey’s descriptions of Marble Springs, but added some extravagant detail that may have been speculative, in 1887. The book didn’t sell as well as author James R. Gilmore hoped, and was harshly criticized by young historian Teddy Roosevelt, but it was popular in Tennessee. 
Popular Gov. Robert Taylor proposed that Sevier’s Alabama grave be exhumed and reinterred on the lawn of the new courthouse in Knoxville. Although only a few bones were found in the grave, the pageantry of the reburial, after a parade down Gay Street, was one of the biggest single events in Knoxville history, attended by an estimated 30,000. The extraordinary event made front-page headlines as far away as California. There was even more pageantry four years later when the erection of an enormous marble obelisk on the site became an occasion for multiple speeches and poetry recitations, some of them published.
By then, “Uncle George” Kirby, now elderly, was a subject of short profiles in the newspapers—partly notable for his green thumb and his regularity as a seller at Market Square, every single Friday—but also because he lived in a cabin associated with John Sevier, who had been the subject of so much national hubbub.
For probably the first time, in 1895, a Knox County map identified THE OLD SEVIER PLACE.
Still, Marble Springs remained little known to most people. At the end of the horse and buggy days, it was still remote. Most people who noticed the old unmarked cabins were on their way to and from Neubert’s Springs, the resort run by a German-immigrant family a mile or two away from the Sevier home.
It was not until 1917, when Alabama-born, Leipzig-educated former professor George Mellen, proposed in his often droll column in the Knoxville News-Sentinel that Marble Springs be preserved.
In 1926, 111 years after Sevier’s death, but for the first time ever—the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Bonnie Kate chapter (named for Sevier’s second wife) placed a visible stone marker at the Sevier site on what was then Neubert Springs Road. Mellen was the featured speaker, in the last year of his life. It was a positive step, though the fact that the new marker was made of stones from what was believed to be a fallen chimney from Sevier’s home may imply that an authentic reconstruction of the house was considered unlikely. 
Things didn’t improve quickly. One old cabin, once said to be Seviers’ kitchen, was destroyed in a 1929 windstorm.
The changing times suggested some urgency. Many people had cars now, and by 1930, people were driving them to the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and some of those routes took them by Marble Springs. Fixing it up would be a way to capture some tourist interest. Moreover, historians were looking forward to the Tennessee Sesquicentennial commemoration of 1946, which could bring state money to historic sites. And it did. The state legislature did recognize Marble Springs as the Sevier home, with several thousand dollars for its improvement. By 1941, work began, only to be delayed by the war effort. But what to save, and how to save it, was a complicated issue. Beginning as early as the 1890s, some newspaper accounts were questioning whether anything remained of the Sevier era at Marble Springs. Accounts of what was still there, and what was authentic to Sevier’s time, were conflicting and ever changing.
But by degrees, they began to fix up a very old cabin on the site, designating it as Sevier’s own—there was more certainty about that designation in the 1940s and ‘50s than there had been in previous generations.
There was an odd kink in the story in 1955, when there was an earnest proposal, supported by several Knoxville politicians and even some historians and architects, to move the Sevier cabin to downtown Knoxville, to join Blount Mansion and another old tavern as part of a history park. The idea was afloat for four or five years, but had its critics, and seemed to die when one of Sevier’s distant successors, Gov. Frank Clement, declined to offer state money to make it work. In the end it was easier to find money to fix up the cabins on the site, and eventually procure more historic cabins from the area—not to attempt to duplicate the unknowable details of the Seviers’ homeplace, but to suggest a frontier settlement of their era.
Questions about the age of the oldest of the four historic cabins led to some rigorous scientific study led by the late archaeologist Charles Faulkner and others in 2007. A dendrochonological analysis concluded that the oldest surviving cabin, the only one original to the site, probably dated to 1835, about 20 years after Sevier’s death—one perhaps built by George Kirby, who lived there until he died, 60 years later. The Walker Cabin, brought from the Walker Springs area in West Knoxville, is probably a little older, dating to 1828. Still, it’s one of the oldest historic log cabins in the Knoxville area.
Despite the fact that for most of its history it was forgotten and neglected, Marble Springs has become one of the emblematic historic sites of Knox County, a site for reenactments, lectures, picnics, family gatherings, musket firings, and band concerts. Whether John and Bonnie Kate Sevier would have recognized their old home, it’s still an interesting assemblage of historic cabins, and a lovely place to contemplate the passage of more than two centuries. But it's an interesting site not just associated with an early pioneer's final years. It offers the option to remember some of its later history, that of our most beloved farmers, Uncle George Kirby, perhaps with a local-food festival, featuring some of the best of home-grown tomatoes, pumpkins—perhaps with pumpkin pie made from local butter, another Kirby specialty.
Today, visitors are welcome to explore Marble Springs State Historic Site, one of Knoxville's seven Historic House Museums.
