How Knoxville Became a Railroad Town

Although he’s an engineer by training, Bob Davis has made himself an expert on the history of aviation (he’s a pilot himself), bridge construction, riverboats, and barbershop harmonies, but he always comes back to what may be his keenest interest, railroads. He has researched and written some monographs on the subject of railroads in Knoxville, and on Thursday, Dec. 3, he’ll be our guest for a well-illustrated conversation about how Knoxville became a railroad town. Although Knoxville has had no regular passenger service in 50 years, the city hosted a major railroad conference in 1836, and was once a national hub for railroads; Davis has counted almost 200 different railroad initiatives intended to connect to Knoxville. Most of them were never built, but when real railroads did arrive, years behind schedule, they created a new city in the old frontier capital. To a large degree, railroads created Knoxville as we know it.

Davis has done extensive research on railroad architecture, and will be talking about the buildings we still have, and many others long gone. The subject resonates with this time of year. It was in early December, 1907, when Southern Railway opened a major facility downtown to augment its main station and accommodate 500 more passengers than before, just in time for the holiday rush, when the trains not only accommodated holiday travel, but also major shopping travel—back then, thousands of people from East Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina rode the trains to Knoxville to spend a few days shopping for things they couldn’t find at home.