Knoxville: A Divided City

Samuel Bell Palmer was born in Knoxville in 1843, the son of an Irish immigrant who went from tailor to merchant, and he drew the crowded Gay Street scene of 1861 from memory two years later, as a prisoner. He had joined a Confederate artillery battery in May 1862. After Union troops took the city in September 1863 he and his brother John were sent to Camp Douglas in Chicago, and both were released on March 13, 1865. Palmer married in Columbus, Georgia, in 1868 and died on February 11, 1872, not yet thirty years old.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — steps away
  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.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 1.3 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 16 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 — 17 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

• Treaty of Holston — steps away
• Old Knox County Courthouse — steps away
• Staub's Theatre — steps away
• James Park Home — steps away