War on the Home Front (Mabry-Hazen House and Bethel Cemetery)

Joseph A. Mabry Jr. built this house around 1858 for his wife Laura Evelyn Hazen, while ranking among Knoxville's largest slaveholders. He began the war as a vocal Confederate who equipped a company, took the oath of allegiance in February 1864 under Union occupation, and later published the Knoxville Whig. In 1882 he and banker Thomas O'Conner killed each other downtown over a land dispute, and a son died too; Mark Twain retold the shootout in Life on the Mississippi. The house opened as a museum in 1992.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 0.3 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 — 1.0 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 — 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

• Confederate Cemetery — 0.2 mi
• William Francis Yardley — 0.2 mi
• Odd Fellows Cemetery — 0.4 mi
• Knoxville Birthplace of Mountain Dew — 0.6 mi