I kicked off our 2025 Old North Knoxville Victorian Home Tour recap yesterday and promptly got waylaid by the jaw-dropping transformations of the Bertha Clark House (523 E. Oklahoma Ave.) and the Hattar House (217 E. Scott Ave.). I lingered. I stared. I fell down a rabbit hole and never quite resurfaced. Classic Leslie behavior. But today I’m back, focused and determined to actually make it through the rest of the tour.
Before we dive in, a massive note of gratitude is due to the Old North Knoxville Home Tour Committee, whose deep-dive research makes this event so much more than a walk through pretty houses, and whose work I pillaged for this report. The guide calendar and website are rich with historical context and detail, adding real texture to the tour experience and providing a valuable record of these homes for the future.
First Lutheran Church (1207 North Broadway)
Houses of worship count as homes, too, and this one earns its place with glowing stained-glass Memorial Windows and a standout pipe organ built in Hamburg, Germany, by Rudolf von Beckerath in 1974. It’s a striking building inside and out, with a calm, luminous interior that rewards a slow wander.
The site itself has deep roots. In 1888, when Broad Street north of downtown was quickly becoming the county road to Tazewell, the property was occupied by the suburban home of Cornelius E. Lucky, an attorney who later led the Knoxville Brick Company and served as vice president of Peoples’ Telephone and Telegraph…