It was no longer the saloon district, of course, but there were still dozens of old buildings, mostly built of wood, mostly two or three stories, crowded up and down the street, now occupied by beer joints, bootleggers’ shops, pool halls, a few “eating houses.” Vincent started calling his column “Strolling” when he started strolling down there, back when when the broad-porched old whorehouses were still standing, along with Ike Jones’ Saloon, the one where the outlaw Kid Curry shot two Knoxville policemen, and when pre-prohibition advertising for long-defunct beers was still legible. It began hardly a block and a half from the old newsroom, and was a wellspring of stories. However, as a young reporter from Kentucky before the war, Vincent was fascinated with his adopted city, and especially the old section of it called the Bowery. As an older man he lived in the country, and had mostly country interests. He was the News-Sentinel columnist who wrote about birds and trees and mountain people and prize watermelons. Most people who’ve been here more than 50 years remember that name. We might not know much more than that except for a particularly curious newspaper columnist named Bert Vincent.īert Vincent header (Courtesy Knoxville-News Sentinel/Knox County Public Library) We know about most of them via listings in the city directory. Some herb men publicly foreswore voodoo, denouncing it as “against the Bible.” Some did not. The “herb men” had actual addresses, and did business just off a downtown sidewalk, like any retailer.
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The weird character known as Mother in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Suttree, set in the early 1950s, may not have been fictional.īut you had to know how to find her. A mayoral delegation went to her to see about lifting the long-rumored curse off the 400 block of Gay Street, which had been visited by far more than its share of catastrophic fires. There were herb women, too, like the “hoodoo queen” who practiced in a hovel near the mouth of First Creek.
The most visible part of the culture were the “herb men” who practiced along the Bowery–known to mapmakers as South Central Street–and in the Cripple Creek area, the bottomland just to the east of the modern Old City. There was a market for heads, like there’s a market for ivory tusks. Certain heads were known to have magical powers. It was also implicated in some grave robberies, in some disturbed graves, heads were discovered missing from corpses. The word sometimes came up in murder cases, in strange diseases reported to Knoxville General, in both marriages and divorces, when it was claimed one spouse exerted a weird control over the other. If never common, Voodoo was always around the fringes of town. The perfect setting for a herb man to trade his unusual wares. For people who couldn’t afford doctors, herbal remedies were worth a try.ĭuring the 1890s, the Bowery, shown here at the corner of Central and Vine, was an eclectic place. But many people still wanted their roots and herbs. Pharmacies started selling fewer roots and herbs, more factory-made pills and syrups. They began advertising around 1890, first under the heading of “roots and herbs.” Around the turn of the century, medical science was getting more scientific, claiming to sell only the stuff that was proven to be effective and safe. It was also the epicenter of a sort of underground economy, the herb men.
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The neighborhood known as the Bowery also included hundreds of little shops: secondhand shops run by immigrants, some early black barber shops and movie theaters, some of the city’s first Chinese laundries, some of the city’s last livery stables and blacksmiths, and drugstores that sold things that mainstream drugstores didn’t. But the neighborhood was a good deal more complicated than that. The Old City has played with that reputation for decades. On his death certificate, he was listed matter-of-factly as an “Herb Doctor.” By reputation, he was a conjurer.īy now most folks know Knoxville once had a saloon district, and that it hosted a few whorehouses. The dead man was known on the Bowery as Doc Mullins, and he was, to most of Knoxville, a mystery. At old Knoxville General Hospital, the man was pronounced dead.
A college boy, driving his car back to campus after a night on the town, collided with the dark man, knocking him down and breaking his skull. In late October, 1935, well after midnight, a mysterious man was running across old East Church Avenue near Mulvaney Street carrying a dead chicken.
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