Library News

One hundred years ago, people were curious about Christmases of the past, too. By the 1920s, Isabella Cowan Rhea (1849-1935) had lived in downtown Knoxville for three quarters of a century, and her family had been in downtown since frontier times.

A new addition to 601 S. Gay Street is turning heads. But one head in particular is missing. If you’ve noticed the newly installed marble sculpture in a nook at the East Tennessee History Center, you will certainly notice a missing head, and a hand for that matter.

      To mark the McClung Historical Collection’s 13^th Moses Smith Day highlight, celebrating our esteemed Civil War veteran and Custom House policeman Moses Smith, McClung Reference Librarian Danette Welch looks at the life of another Knoxvillian who died on a November

Roderick “Roddie” Waring Edmonds was born to Thomas C. Edmonds and Jennie Sexton Edmonds in Knoxville on August 20, 1919.

Dr. John Edward Reinhardt was born to Edward Reinhardt and Alice Miller Reinhardt in Glade Spring, Virginia, on March 8, 1920. The family moved to Knoxville by 1927.

Opal Wells Wayland was born to William R. and Annie Graybeal Wells in Knox County on August 28, 1912.

      In the summer of 1879, Martin Woody seemed to have it all: a successful business, a beautiful wife, healthy children, a modern house in a coveted neighborhood and a position as one of the best-known young businessmen and building professionals about town.

Like everyone, we are heartbroken over the destruction from Hurricane Helene. The loss of life is devastating, and the loss of property is difficult.

The curtain is coming up on several theatre productions in our area, and Knox County Public Library is excited to help provide access to some of them through the Read City Explorer Pass program.

We tried something different this year, and it was clearly an epic hit.

“Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, the leisure class grew infatuated with a particular type of healthy getaway: the water cure. By the 1850s, a constellation of spa villages had emerged across 20 states.

December 26, 1937, was among the happiest days of 23-year old Claudia Elizabeth Brooks’s life. Dressed in a brown tweed suit, draped in a fur coat, she walked down the aisle at Knoxville’s Second Presbyterian Church to marry her college sweetheart, James Woodruff Hayward.

“…I knew him [Jesse] well as he was great friends with my husband [James Greenway].  He said he had a wife and some children back in Carolina and he intended, if he ever could, to go back to them.  He wouldn’t pay attention to any other woman though he was a good-looking young fellow, a