Day 232: "The Marble City"

Here is what i learned today, about Knoxville and my new neighborhood (which also happens to be my old neighborhood circa the early 1980s).


The Marble City
The whole city of Knoxville was once proud to be known as the Marble City, and that phrase has re-entered currency just recently with the city's recent spiritual renaissance.

However, for almost a century, a stretch of Sutherland Avenue from Concord Street west to Bearden has been known as Marble City. The term isn't used quite as familiarly as it was 50 years ago, but the Marble City Baptist Church and Marble City United Methodist are both still there, right in the middle of that section.

Knoxville had a lot of marble industry all around the county, quarries on the east and south sides and even out in Cedar Bluff, which is named for a marble quarry. South Knoxville's unique marble Candoro headquarters, host of the annual Vestal festival known as Vestival, is still well known today as a historic site. By the 1890s, the city was making much of its "Marble City" monicker, as several businesses used the name, which implied some class and authenticity, and durability. The Marble City Hat Co., the Marble City Bank, the Marble City Fire Extinguisher, the Marble City Saloon, etc., all thrived about a century or more ago. It can be puzzling to historical innocents that they were all downtown, not in the west-side neighborhood later known as Marble City.

However, at the early 20th-century height of Knoxville's marble industry, several of the big marble companies had mills and warehouses on the west side of town, convenient to the Southern and L&N freight lines, in the vicinity of Sutherland and Concord: the Empire Marble Co., Grey Eagle, and the John J. Craig Co., to mention three, plus the Appalachian Marble Co. over on Middlebrook at Third Creek.

By 1911, the area just between Mechanicsville and Bearden was listed separately in city directories as a "western suburb" called Marble City. It included a county elementary school known as Marble City School, which christened the community by that name... read more here from the Metro Pulse's Doc Knox->

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