A trip to Knoxville can be filled with unexpected sights and experiences, so it’s best to stay a few nights. To find a Knoxville hotel, click here, and spend some time exploring the Marble City. The city gained its nickname from a number of quarries that provides the marble for public buildings around the nation, including Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. The second oldest city in the state, after Nashville, originated in 1779, just three years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It’s the home of the University of Tennessee, whose sports teams, known as the Volunteers, are so popular that the county’s area code is 865, which alphabetically is VOLS. It’s also the home of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, which you may wish to visit, especially if you’d like to see the world’s largest basketball, a fixture outside the building that weighs approximately ten tons. But Knoxville isn’t just for sports fans. It contains some interesting historic sites, especially from the Civil War, and that includes the Mabry-Hazen House Museum and Bethel Cemetery.
On the list of the National Register of Historic Places, the Mabry-Hazen House Museum may be found on top of Mabry Hill; it’s a Victorian home, containing among the biggest collections of that era’s artifacts in the U.S., including antique furniture, crystal, silver, and china. The home was built in 1858 and remained home to the same family for three generations, lasting from 1865 to 1987, a period of a hundred and twenty-two years. During the Civil War, this place was headquarters not only for the Confederate Army, but also for the Union Army, presumably not simultaneously! Four of the home’s five acres is taken up by the Civil War Bethel Cemetery.
The Bethel Cemetery holds over 1,600 Confederate soldiers, three hundred of whom were killed during the Battle of Fort Sanders. There also Union soldiers here, too, but far less: There’s fifty union soldiers, as well as twenty Civil War veterans buried here. You’ll find a monument for the Confederate dead that was put up by the Ladies Memorial Association a hundred and eighteen years ago in 1892. The last owner of the cemetery, a Miss Mamie Winstead, willed the burial grounds to the Hazen Hisorical Museum Foundation in 1989. You’ll see here, too, a white framed house, which was built in 1886, which was constructed on behalf of a Confederate veteran who, during the Battle of Gettysburg, lost a leg.
The Mabry-Hazen House Museum and the Bethel Cemetery is just one of several historical sites available to travelers in Knoxville.
Jan 25