Last week, we spent some time at Knoxville’s Old Gray Cemetery. But there are too many stories worth sharing to limit to just one post. So let’s move on to Part II.

If you spend any time reading my blog, you’ll find many stories about women who died young. It was simply how it was before the advent of antibiotics, nutritional awareness and sanitary conditions. As I started looking into the lives of some of the ladies buried at Old Gray, the sad stories accumulated all too quickly.

It’s hard to miss the monument for Virginia Rosalie Coxe. The angel standing in front of the cross is missing part of her arm, but is relatively intact. As you can see, her name is almost worn off of the base. But the lines below it are still there:

In the dawn of the day of ages
in the youth of a wondrous race,
’twas the dreamer who saw the marvel,
‘Twas the dreamer who knew God’s face.

Born in Virginia in 1863, Virginia “Jennie” Rosalie Michie was supposedly educated at Atlanta’s Gate City High School. However, it’s an institution I can find no information about. I think the reporter meant Girls’ High School, which was known for its academic excellence. It was in Atlanta where I believe Jennie met her future husband, Joseph Coxe. They married there in 1882. Coxe is described in one newspaper as “an eccentric coal baron” from North Carolina. Nevertheless, the couple was quite wealthy.

Joseph and Jennie lived in New Jersey and Philadelphia before moving to Knoxville. They had two children, Annie and Rosalie. Annie died in childhood but Rosalie would live well into adulthood, marrying and having children.

The Danielle Steele of the 1890s

The Coxes traveled a great deal and moved in society circles, even living in Spain for some time. But Jennie’s greatest pleasure came from authoring romantic stories under nommes de plume such as Percy Thorpe and Virginia Jerome. It was under the latter that she published the novel Princess Beelzebub. She also enjoyed writing poems, short stories, and songs.

Joseph may have initially balked at the idea of having a popular author for a wife, but eventually Jennie wrote under her own name. It was her book The Embassy Ball, published in 1898, that she is most remembered for. From the articles I read, reporters considered her a good interview and women enjoyed settling down with one of her novels. I’d compare her to a Danielle Steele or a Nora Roberts for the 1890s.

A 1901 article in the Nashville-based Tennesseean newspaper describes her elegant Knoxville home Crescent Bluff as having an Italian rose garden overlooking a river. The Coxes hosted many parties there. I also found an advertisement in a Knoxville-based gardening magazine touting a new hybrid tea rose from the Dingee & Conrad Co. that was named after her.

Jennie and Joseph saw their daughter, Rosalie, married to Daniel Hull in 1904 in a lavish wedding at Crescent Bluff. Sadly, Jennie died of Bright’s disease on June 24, 1908 at Crescent Bluff. She was 44 years old.

What Was Bright’s Disease?

Bright’s disease was a catch-all term for several kidney-related disorders, most often what we now call nephritis. The symptoms and signs of Bright’s disease were first described in 1827 by the English physician Richard Bright, for whom the disease was named. Today, nephritis is much easier to treat and not always fatal as it could be in the 1800s. President Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, died in 1914 of Bright’s disease when she was 54.

In 1911, Crescent Bluff, the home where Jennie entertained and lovingly tended her garden, was totally destroyed by fire.

Joseph did not remarry but traveled, spending much of his final years in Italy. He died of pneumonia in 1923 while in Lucerne, Switzerland. Records indicate his body was embalmed and placed in a vault awaiting burial instructions. I haven’t found anything to indicate what happened to him after that. Daughter Rosalie died in 1978 and is buried at Laurel Grove Cemetery in Savannah, Ga.

Much less is known about a woman buried near Jennie. But the monument for Ora Brewster Blanton got me looking into what her story might be.

Ora Brewater was born in 1858 in Sweetwater, Tenn. It appears her father died when she was a child, leaving her mother to raise her and her two sisters (one died in childhood and the other at age 30). Ora likely had to work to support her family. Ora eventually moved to Shelby, N.C. to teach music at the Shelby Female Academy.

Death After Surgery

It was in Sheby that Ora met Charles Coleman Blanton, a hardware/dry goods merchant from a prominent family. They married in Monroe, Tenn. in 1885 and moved to Meridian, Texas where Charles worked in the banking business. There are no records indicating they had any children.

Ora died only five years later in 1890 shortly after undergoing an operation. I don’t know what it was for. Her body was sent back to Knoxville for burial at Old Gray Cemetery, where her mother and her sister, Vallie, are also buried.

In 1895, Charles returned to North Carolina to work with his father and brother at the First National Bank of Shelby. Charles never remarried, becoming a prominent business leader in Shelby and active community member until his death in 1944. He is buried in Shelby’s Sunset Cemetery, where over 100 Blantons are listed.

Joe DePriest’s book about the Banker’s House in Shelby, where Charles Blanton grew up and I believe returned to after Ora’s death, had the only information I could find on Ora’s life. It’s included on the Banker’s House website. Joe and I have swapped emails and I appreciated his help very much.

The Death of Two Wives

Next to Ora Blanton is the monument to Frank Atkin and his two wives, Rosa and Lida. Frank’s brother, Clay Brown “C.B.” Atkin, was a major mover and shaker in Knoxville’s downtown development. He owned and operated several hotels, the jewel in the crown being Hotel Atkin. He was also instrumental in the Tennessee Theater’s establishment. Frank helped his brother in his many business ventures in a less public role.

Born in 1863 to Samuel and Nancy Ault Atkin, Frank married Rosa Estelle Ault (I am guessing they were cousins) in 1884 in Knoxville. They had one son, Frank Jr., in 1885, and a daughter, Lillian, in 1889. Rose died on Nov. 1, 1890 of consumption, now known as tuberculosis.

In today’s world, tuberculosis is preventable and very treatable, with a death rate of only 10 percent. People with compromised immune systems who contract it are most at risk of death. But at the start of the 19th century, tuberculosis was a serious threat to life. It took the discovery of the tuberculosis bacteria by Robert Koch in 1882 for that to start to change. Even then, developing effective treatment would not come for another 50 years.

Frank remarried in 1893 to stenographer Lida Coffin in Hamilton County, Ohio. Lida died on June 1, 1895 of “puerperal peritonitis” or “childbed fever” shortly after giving birth. She was only 27 years old.

“Childbed Fever” Strikes

“Puerperal peritonitis” haunted women for centuries, often striking a few days after childbirth. Unsanitary conditions played a large role in causing these infections and there were no antibiotics yet to treat them after it occurred. It’s surprising to think that once upon a time, a doctor might drag on the same dirty clothes he wore the night before to deliver another child with unclean instruments, but it happened.

In 1903, Frank married a third time to a woman named Lucille. She was 22 and he was 42, making her only a few years older than his daughter, Lillian. I could not find a record of their marriage but they are listed as such on the 1910 Census. Frank died in October 1910 and records state the cause of death was “general breakdown”. He is buried at Old Gray with Rosa and Lida.

Both of Frank’s children, Frank Jr. and Lillian, lived long lives. Lillian is buried at Old Gray with her parents while Frank Jr. is buried with his wife, Robbie Atkin, at Berry Highland Memorial Cemetery in Knoxville. I don’t know what happened to third wife, Lillian Atkin, but I suspect she remarried.

I have more tales from Old Gray yet to share, so come back for Part III.

— Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, 1750

Last week, I visited Tennessee’s Knoxville National Cemetery and shared the story of the Union Soldiers Tower. Next door is Old Gray Cemetery which is a little older and a bit bigger than KNC.

Once used as pastureland just outside Knoxville’s city limits, the land that became Old Gray Cemetery was considered ideal for a suburban cemetery. The first parcel was purchased in December 1849, and landscape architect Frederick Douglass was hired to come up with a ground plan. Founded in 1850 and dedicated in 1852, it was called Gray Cemetery until 1892 when New Gray Cemetery opened about a mile away. Old Gray now covers almost 14 acres.

Named After a Famous Poem

Old Gray Cemetery got its name from Thomas Gray (1716-1771), the English poet who wrote the poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in 1750. It was suggested by Henrietta Brown Reese, wife of Judge William B. Reese. He was Old Gray’s first board of trustees president.

Many of Old Gray’s first burials were victims of Knoxville’s 1854 cholera epidemic. The cemetery also contains several victims of the New Market train wreck of 1904. The tragedy occurred when two Southern Railway passenger trains collided head on near New Market, Tenn. on Sat., Sept. 24, 1904, killing at least 56 passengers and crew and injuring 106.

The area around Old Gray (and KNC) is home to a large homeless population, many of whom come to the Salvation Army Center nearby. A number were living under the Broadway overpass in 2017 but a 2018 article detailed the city’s plan to turn that area into a “day park” for the homeless so that may have changed things.

When Sean and I were there, we saw a few homeless men quietly eating their lunch in the cemetery. Elsewhere, some college students were sunning themselves on blankets, enjoying the unusually warm weather for November and what was left of the colorful autumn leaves.

One of the first graves inside the cemetery gates is a slab gravestone for the Rev. Thomas William Humes, first president of the University of Tennessee (under that name). First known as Blount College, it opened in 1794 with the Rev. Samuel Carrick as president.

A Journalist, Lawyer, and Minister

Humes graduated from East Tennessee College (what the University of Tennessee was called at that time) in 1831, and obtained his master’s degree there two years later. He entered Princeton Theological Seminary to become a Presbyterian minister, but left after deciding he could not take the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Back in Knoxville in the mid-1840s, Humes  studied under Tennessee’s Episcopal Bishop James Otey. In July 1845, Humes was ordained a priest by Bishop Otey, and in September 1846, Knoxville’s St. John’s Episcopal Church congregation elected him rector.

Although Rev. Humes had owned slaves, he helped several slaves in Knoxville purchase their freedom during the late 1840s and 1850s. He also opened a school for Knoxville’s free blacks and freed slaves. During the secession crisis of 1860 and 1861, Humes stayed loyal to the Union, despite the fact many relatives and most of his congregation supported secession. After he refused to acknowledge Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s National Day of Prayer in 1861, Rev. Humes resigned as rector.

When General Ambrose Burnside’s Union forces occupied Knoxville in September 1863, Burnside asked Rev. Humes to resume his position at St. John’s and he agreed. St. John’s member and Confederate diarist Ellen Renshaw House boycotted Rev. Humes’s opening sermon, calling Humes “the grandest old rascal that ever was.”

In 1865, Rev. Humes became president of then-East Tennessee University and secured an $18,500 federal grant to help restore the school’s deteriorated campus, occupied by both Union and Confederate armies during the war. In 1869, Tennessee’s state government designated the school the recipient of the state’s Morrill Act (land grant) funds. This amounted to $400,000, which generated for the school $24,000 in annual interest.

In 1879, East Tennessee University changed its name a final time to the University of Tennessee. Rev. Humes resigned as president in 1883, and was succeeded by Charles Dabney in 1884. In later years, Rev. Humes helped raise funds for educational and economic development in East Tennessee. He died on January 16, 1892.

Avowed Unionist with Shifting Loyalties

Across the drive, you can see monuments and a bench for the Maynard family. Horace Maynard was another East Tennessean loyal to the Union, despite the fact his views seemed to flip flop depending on the times.

Born in 1814 in Westboro, Mass., Maynard graduated from Amherst College in 1838 and came to East Tennessee College to teach. Maynard also studied law. Admitted to the Bar, he began practicing in 1844.

Maynard also involved himself in politics. Unsuccessful in his first bid for national office in 1853, he was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1857. He was re-elected twice and served until Tennessee seceded from the Union. He went on to serve as the Attorney General of Tennessee (1863-1865) and as a delegate to the Southern Loyalist Convention in Philadelphia (1866).

Maynard’s views on slavery reflected shifting sentiments common among East Tennessee Unionists. During the 1830s, Maynard, the son of an abolitionist, called slavery “a curse to the country.” But by 1850, Maynard was defending the practice of slavery in letters to his father. In 1860, Maynard owned four slaves, and while he opposed secession as a congressman, he still defended slavery. Toward the end of the Civil War, Maynard again adopted an abolitionist viewpoint, and supported Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

After Tennessee was readmitted to the Union, Maynard was again elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and served until 1875. He then campaigned unsuccessfully for the governorship of Tennessee. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him U. S. Ambassador to Turkey in 1875, where he remained until May 1880. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him Postmaster General in June 1880 and he served until 1881. Horace Maynard died in Knoxville on May 3, 1882.

Horace Maynard and his wife, Laura Ann, had seven children together. During the Spanish–American War, the USS Nashville, commanded by their son, Washburn, fired the war’s first American shot. Eldest son Edward, who is buried near his parents at Old Gray, has a tragic story worth mentioning.

Death in the Caribbean

Born in Knoxville in 1843, Edward Maynard was attending Eastern Tennessee University when the Civil War broke out. His studies were abruptly curtailed, as he and his fellow students chose up sides and left to enlist.

Soon after joining the Union’s 6th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, Edward was promoted to lieutenant colonel and attached to the 23rd Army Corps. Maynard’s regiment was at the Battle of Murfreesboro, engaged the enemy near Lost Mountain, Ga. in June 1864 and took part in the Battle of Nashville. He escaped unscathed and mustered out in March 1865.

After the war, Edward held a minor position in the secretary of state’s office in Nashville. In May 1866, he became consul to the Turks Island, at the time a British-held island north of Cuba and Hispaniola. Unfortunately, his two years in the tropics ended tragically.

On January 10, 1868, Edward Maynard died of Yellow Fever. His family did not receive news of his death until Feb. 7, 1868.

The Short Life of Lillien Gaines

Finally, I’d like to share the story of a monument that I saw from some distance and made certain I got a look at soon after we arrived.

Born in Savannah in 1868, Lillien Gaines was the daughter of Confederate Col. James L. Gaines and Belle Porter Gaines. A native of Knoxville, Col. Gaines was wounded at the Battle of Five Forks and lost his arm in the last days of the Civil War. He was already engaged to Missouri native Belle Porter. According to one account I read, Col. Gaines offered to release her from their engagement due to his “mutilation and poverty” but that she married him anyway.

After marrying on Nov. 22, 1865, Col. Gaines and Belle moved to New York where son Ambrose was born in 1866. They then moved to Savannah, where Lillien was born. They later moved to Knoxville where Col. Gaines was elected comptroller in 1875 and the family moved yet again to Nashville.

The Gaines’ had only been in Nashville a short time when Lillien became ill. She died on April 29, 1876. While a Memphis newspaper reported she died of meningitis, Tennessee death records indicate she died of “paralysis of the lungs.” Her grieving parents brought her body back to Knoxville, where her father was born and Lillien had spent most of her short life.

Col. Gaines and Belle returned to Nashville where they had a third child, James, in 1878. Col. Gaines died in 1910 and Belle died in 1913. Both of them are buried next to Lillien.

There are many stories yet to share from Old Gray Cemetery in Part II.

 

 

 

I’m leaving Nebraska behind for now and heading closer to home with a visit to Knoxville National Cemetery (KNC).

Would it surprise you to know that KNC is home to a 60-foot monument dedicated to Tennessee’s Union soldiers?

Before I dive into that, let me set the scene. My in-laws live in Knoxville and we visit them often. During Thanksgiving week of 2017, I knew I wanted to get over to KNC and Old Gray Cemetery, which are conveniently located right next to each other and share a stone wall border. So on a sunny fall day, I grabbed my son and we headed downtown.

Because we were visiting Old Gray as well, we spent less time at KNC than I would have liked. There were also some visitors at KNC that day that appeared to be sharing a quiet moment at a loved one’s grave and I did not want to disturb them with our presence.

While Tennessee is a Southern state, it did not secede from the Union quickly or easily. In fact, it was the last state in the Union to leave it on June 8, 1861. In the state’s mountainous eastern section, few people owned slaves and voters opposed secession by more than 2-to-1.

As it turns out, Tennessee furnished more soldiers for the Confederate Army than any other state and more soldiers for the Union Army than any other Southern state. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, while Tennessee did send over 120,000 soldiers to fight for the Confederacy, over 31,000 men fought for the Union. While there’s quite a difference in those two numbers, it makes a Union monument in Knoxville not so unusual after all.

According to the cemetery web site, Union Major Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside established Knoxville National Cemetery during the Civil War after the siege of Knoxville and subsequent Battle of Fort Sanders on November 29, 1863. Unlike most Union commanders, while Burnside was an Indiana native, he had close ties to the South because his father grew up in South Carolina.

Burnside was known for his distinctive facial hair and because of it we can thank him for the term “side burns”. After the Civil War, he was elected to three one-year terms as Governor of Rhode Island, serving from May 29, 1866, to May 25, 1869.

The land Burnside acquired for the new federal cemetery amounted to almost 10 acres. After the war in March 1867, legal judgment in the U.S. District Court in Knoxville, when it was already the site of more than 2,000 burials, affirmed the U.S. government’s purchase of the land.

Burnside is thought to have given the task of laying out the cemetery to his assistant quartermaster, Captain Hilton Sanborn (H.S.) Chamberlain. There’s a little uncertainty about that. The cemetery’s first burials were Union dead exhumed and moved from Cumberland Gap and other parts of the region. By 1874, there were 3,135 interments in the 10-acre tract. Approximately a third were unknown.

The cemetery’s plan was so effective that KNC was one of the few in the nation that required no alterations upon being designated a national cemetery after the war.

After the war, Tennessee adopted a constitutional amendment forbidding human property on February 22, 1865 and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 18, 1866. It became the first state readmitted to the Union on July 24, 1866.

That leads me to the Union Soldiers Monument at KNC. I learned that its grand size was no accident.

In 1892, Knoxville’s Confederate veterans installed a 48-foot monument topped by a statue of a Confederate soldier at Bethel Cemetery near the Mabry-Hazen House in East Knoxville. There are over 1,000 Confederate soldiers buried there. I saw that monument in January this year, but it was through the cemetery fence because Bethel Cemetery is only open on Saturdays for a few hours. I imagine the fear of vandalism is what is behind that.

In response, the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) formed a commission, headed by former Union Army officer and Knoxville Journal publisher William Rule, to raise money to build a bigger monument at KNC. The commission signed a contract with William B. McMullen, presi­dent of the Tennessee Producers Marble Company and the Southern Monument Company, for material and construction, and with Colonel William A. Gage for engineering consultation.

The cornerstone was laid in 1896 but fundraising went slowly. The Spanish American War also intruded but perhaps spurred Knoxvillians to begin to see KNC in a new light. During the Civil War, it was the resting place of men mostly from far away who died in or near East Tennessee and had to be buried here. Now it was to be the resting place of men from East Tennessee who died far away and whose families requested them to be buried at KNC.

In the end, the monument cost $11,300. Of the estimated 7,000 donations, most came as one-dollar offerings from Union pensioners. The 50-foot-tall marble tower, topped by a bronze eagle with outspread wings, was unveiled on Oct. 24, 1901. Some were surprised because the original plans had featured a Union Soldier on top, not an eagle.

On August 22, 1904, the Union Soldiers Monument was struck by a bolt of lightning during a storm. The castle-like foundation was a ruin and the strike sent chunks of stone into houses across the street. The bronze eagle and the cannonball it was perched upon were missing from the monument’s top. The eagle was found on the ground in four pieces, its head and wings severed.

Unfazed, the GAR commissioners planned a quick rebuild, this time using federal funds secured by Congressman Henry R. Gibson. Designed by the local architectural firm Baumann Brothers, the new monument largely followed the original design. The main difference was that the bronze eagle was replaced by an eight-foot statue of a Union soldier. The new monument was completed on October 15, 1906.

This is what it looks like today.

Some people refer to it as the Wilder Monument because the soldier is said to resemble Union general and East Tennessee businessman John T. Wilder, who was the only ranking general on the memorial tower committee. There’s actually a Wilder Monument at Georgia’s Chickamauga Battlefield that was built to honor him. It features a castellated tower with an interior staircase, but with no statue on top.

Here’s General Wilder as a soldier.

Here’s as good of a close up as I could get of the monument soldier.

When the tower was built the first time in 1901, it stood 50-feet tall. But when the rebuild was completed in 1906, it topped out at 60 feet.

You can’t enter the tower but you can look through the door and see the stained glass American eagle inside.

One Civil War Medal of Honor recipient is buried at KNC. Private Timothy Spillane of the 16th Pennsylvania Cavalry received the commendation for gallantry at the Battle of Hatcher’s Run in Virginia. He died in Knoxville in 1901 and was buried at KNC around the time the first tower was erected. World War II Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Troy A. McGill, killed in action in 1944, was originally kept in a military mausoleum in the Philippines, but his remains were re-interred at KNC 1951.

I didn’t know these markers were there so I did not get photos of them during our visit.

Soldiers from all wars, from the Civil War to recent times, are buried at KNC. One of them was Tennessee native Patrick Belmont Northern Earle, born at Three Springs about 40 miles east of Knoxville. He was a graduate of Knoxville High School and at the time of his enlistment was a student of the University of Tennessee.

First Lieut. Earle left Knoxville in September 1917 as an officer of Company D, 117th Infantry. At Camp Sevier, S.C., he became an aide-de-camp of Brig. Gen. William S. Scott, and when the latter was succeeded by Brig. General Tyson in command of the 59th Brigade, First Lieut. Earle remained on staff duty.

However, after reaching France, First Lieut. Earle asked to be assigned to line duty and was ordered to Company M, 118th Infantry. He took part in all engagements up to October 5, 1918, when he was fatally wounded near Bellicourt. He died October 7, 1918. He was only 23 years old.

Before I close, there is a wonderful four-part article by the Knoxville History Project that proved to be a great source for what I wrote. If you want to know more about the origins of Knoxville National Cemetery and its history, you can find it here.

Next time, I’ll be next door at Knoxville’s Old Gray Cemetery.