For the curious out there, there is one paved section of town that sounds a little more interesting than most: Crooked Street. This is the old name for Walnut Street that has fascinated a few Knoxvillians for years. Just like it did during much of the 18th and all of the 19th centuries, the street runs all the way from the river up to the Catholic church on Gallows Hill.
As you may guess from the name, it’s not quite a straight shot like all the other grid-like south-north streets running through downtown. There’s a distinct dogleg at Walnut and Cumberland by the Jame Park House and St. John’s Episcopal Church, hence how it came to be called Crooked Street. How official this name ever was isn’t easy to discern. It’s a common phrase in old newspapers, yet there’s little mention of Crooked Street in the city directories, only in 1869. And that’s not the end of the puzzle, which we’ll come to shortly.
Before Knoxville was founded in October 1791, Gen. James White, the first white settler to make a home here, arriving in the mid-1780s, owned 1,000 acres on the plateau above the river between what we know today as First and Second Creeks. Immediately after the new town was named (by the governor of the Southwest Territory, William Blount, after his superior, Gen. Henry Knox, Secretary of War) James White’s son-in-law, Charles McClung, surveyed a quadrant of his land close to the river and divided it into 64 half-acre lots. The names of Knoxville’s first streets changed a bit during those early years, but in time, the addresses of those living on the western edge of the quadrant (mostly names of men we know very little about) became known as Crooked Street because the road, for some reason that’s a little unclear, needed to go around the James Park house. It’s been suggested that McClung named the original streets after those in Philadelphia, of which there is a Walnut Street. (Incidentally, Gay Street is named after a Baltimore street.)
The James Park house is one of the oldest buildings downtown, second only to Blount Mansion (or third if you count James White’s original cabin). Gen. John Sevier, that inspirational though complicated frontier hero, once owned this lot and attempted to build here in the late 1790s. It’s said that he didn’t progress much beyond the foundation. Like many of the early settlers, he was land rich but cash poor, so he sold the property and later spent time at his South Knoxville “plantation,” what we call Marble Springs today…