Island Home

Perez Dickinson bought the land from Colonel Thomas Spence in 1869 and built a large Italianate house in 1875 on a farm of about 600 acres, named for the island in the river that now bears his name. It ran as a model stock farm and hosted clubs. Trolleys across the 1898 Gay Street Bridge turned it into a suburb: the Island Home Park Company formed in 1899, building began around 1910 and Knoxville annexed the area in 1917. Ninety-one houses were listed on the National Register in 1994, mostly bungalows.

What the plaque says

Island Home In 1846, Perez Dickinson build this house and named it Island Home, and it served as a center for picnics and parties. Legend says that his cousin, Emily Dickinson, wrote some of her poetry during visits to this house. In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th president of the United States, visited here. In 1924, the Tennessee School for the Deaf was moved from downtown Knoxville to the Island Home farm. Since 1924, the house has been designated as the Superintendent's Residence.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 1.6 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Blount Mansion — 2.1 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 18 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 19 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• Colored (Negro) Department: Tennessee School for the Deaf (TSD) — 1.1 mi
• First African American Church — 1.6 mi
• Fork of the River — 1.7 mi
• Odd Fellows Cemetery — 1.8 mi