Library News

Nothing says spring like the crack of the bat. Here in East Tennessee, this spring is all about baseball. In anticipation of the opening of the ballpark, we are celebrating the national pastime with an exhibition and some programs. Plus, we have some suggested reading for your bedside table!

New Year 1827 rang in not only with a bang, but also with a towering wave of fire whose terror and devastation were burned into the memory of almost everyone who lived through it.

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

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.

“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

This year, recipe books and cards in the McClung Collection’s annual holiday cooking display feature Stella DeVault and Malinda Russell, local bakers who honed their culinary skills and business acumen during the days before the Civil War.