Lindbergh Forest

Vic McLean's friends were sure he had taken leave of his senses.

Here he was, fresh from making a pile of money in the 1920s Florida building boom, and now he was back in Knoxville, out there south of the river, buying up the S.B. Luttrell property and building houses.

They'd never sell, his friends told him. Nobody would want to live way out there in what they derisively called "South America."

But McLean persisted, getting his first homes on the market by 1927 - solid two- and three-storied houses, some of brick, others of stone, all with touches of marble inside and out and rooms connected by graceful archways.

They did sell, and soon other builders began clamoring to get lots in the heavily wooded area, with its curvilinear concrete streets.

As a promotion, a contest was held to name the new neighborhood. The winning name was submitted by Emily Cate, wife of an up-and-coming jail official, J. Carroll Cate, noted for his courageous stand against an angry mob in the "race riot" of 1919.. The Cates had purchased a McLean-built home on Chamberlain Boulevard.

Emily Cate's suggestion, which won her $100, was Lindbergh Forest, after the hero of the day, Charles A. Lindbergh, who piloted the first solo flight over the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21, 1927.

McLean housed his own family in Lindbergh Forest, moving them from dwelling to dwelling as he continued to build.

"I grew up there," says Vic McLean Jr., who divides his time now between homes in Knoxville and St. Petersburg, Fla. "I used to ramble those woods from one end to the other. There were big red clay ditches (on a nearby hill) - 10 or 15 feet deep. We used to tunnel through them."

Those ditches disappeared as development gained speed over the next two decades, spurred on by the completion of the Henley Bridge in 1932 and the growing popularity of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. McLean remembers watching as President Roosevelt himself made a grand promenade down Chapman Highway in September 1940 on his way to Newfound Gap to dedicate the park.

By then Lindbergh Forest had become an enclave of the city's entrepreneurs -- the Tinsleys, who founded Tinsley Tire Co., the Blacks of Fred Black Motor Co., the Scruggses of Scruggs Equipment Co., the Luthers of Knoxville Business College.

The Berry family purchased a McLean-built "mansion" in the '40s and moved their funeral business there.

Civic leaders, too, lived in the Forest. -- John T. O'Connor, Knoxville's mayor from 1932 to 1935, raised his six children there, and the mayoral residence stayed in the neighborhood through the '30s; O'Connor was succeeded by his neighbors James W. "Jimmy" Elmore (1936-37) and Walter W. "Judd" Mynatt (1938-39). J. Carroll Cate also moved into public office as Knox County sheriff from 1936 until 1940.

There also were residents on the other side of the law.

Though their recollections differ, McLean, Fred Black Jr., and longtime South Knoxvillian Joe Davenport all remember a house inhabited by two beautiful women who had nightly male callers, sometimes rowdy and always in bountiful numbers. Black says that trees completely enshrouded the house, and McLean vividly recalls his daddy telling him to stay away from it.

Evidence of illicit pleasures of another sort was abundant when Delta Airlines flight attendant Lynne Miller moved into her mission-style stucco house on Chamberlain Boulevard in 1983.

"Bourbon bottles -- hundreds of them. We found them in the yard, in the basement, in the old building out back."

Dewey Holt, who bought the house in January 1938 for $5,500, was owner of Union Milk and Grocery, but he also, says Miller, "was reputed to be the local bootlegger."

Besides combing her new home for whisky bottles, Miller added a master bedroom, converted the old bedroom into the master bath and installed a heating system -- "It had no heat, but it had ductwork, which was unheard of in 1937." Miller, who paid $52,000 -- nearly 10 times more than Holt had 45 years earlier -- for the place, also rescued it from being termed "the turquoise house" by painting it stucco tan.

She became friends with her neighbor across the street, "Miss Emily" Cate, learning from her much of the history of Lindbergh Forest. Now she's excited for Maurice and Christy Mapes, who live in the old Cate home and are expecting their first child in July.

Maurice "Maury" Mapes, 36, grew up in Lindbergh Forest, and after Miss Emily was widowed in 1980, he helped her with household chores.

"She would ask me, 'Maury, do you think you'd like to live in this house?' But I didn't really know she was going to give it to me until after she died."

That was in 1989; Mapes, a marketing manager with LeTrell Sports, moved into his inherited home in 1990. The only renovation he did was to repaint. A few years later he married Christy, a registered nurse.

"Now," he says, "we're getting ready to make a nursery out of one of the little rooms upstairs."

Over on Southwood Drive, just a few steps away from the Mapes home, is the house Maury's dad, Fred Mapes, had built for his family in 1966. Retired teachers Hugh and Janice Sparkman, both in their mid-60s, moved in there four years ago.

"I had had four strokes and bought this house to rehabilitate myself," Hugh Sparkman says. Years earlier, on visits to his pastor, he had met residents of the Forest, and two memories led him to seek a home there: the trees and the people.

"It's an impressive old neighborhood; there were people here who were leaders of Knoxville and yet were all real relaxed and friendly. We like being close to downtown ... yet I can look out my back yard and not see anybody else's home. There are 20-some trees in my yard, but we can drive a mile and a half and get to the World's Fair Park or UT ball games."

The University of Tennessee has played a large part in populating Lindbergh Forest. Both faculty and students have lived there. Deane Stout, UT psychology professor, and his home economics professor wife, Velma (now deceased), moved there in 1955 so they and their three children would be close to their schools.

"One went to UT, one to South High and one to Flenniken (Elementary)," Stout says.

His Chamberlain Boulevard house was formerly owned by a TVA personnel worker named Glass who was injured at work and took off two years to recuperate. He worked on the house during that time, Stout says, and it was shipshape when he bought it for $17,500.

The ad, he recalls, touted the house as having "built-in cabinets on all floors and 97 electrical outlets." The built-ins, he can verify, but as for the outlets: "I've never counted them."

Built-in cabinetry is prevalent in Lindbergh Forest houses, but residents take the most pleasure from playing show-and-tell with the marble work in their homes.

Antique dealer Carol Ann Proaps lives in the Glenhurst Drive house bought in 1953 by her father, who was owner of Arlington Drugs in North Knoxville. Built in 1927 by Howard W. Wiese, proprietor of Ampco Marble Co., the house is a copy of the villa Wiese lived in while on business in Italy.

The flooring in the Proaps sun room and breakfast nook is made of marble pieces from countries around the world. Her kitchen counters, entry floor and stairs are also marble, and the walls in her upstairs bathroom are 12-foot-high stretches of pink Tennessee marble.

French doors open onto a tiny balcony from the second-story bedroom that was Proaps' parents'. Years before, the room was sleeping quarters for UT student Fred Black Jr., whose father bought the house in 1937.

When he would party too late on campus, Black confesses, he would climb the marble on the corner of his house up to that balcony and slip undetected through the French doors into bed.

Black was 10 years old when his folks moved to Lindbergh Forest, and he says "it was the best place in the world to grow up." With his pals, Sammy Tinsley and Buddy Kromer, he fashioned a secret tree house and created a clubhouse inside the neighborhood's 3-foot-tall drainpipe and hid away messages, leaving clues in other spots as to the whereabouts of the mystery messages.

He remembers, too, the war years, when the residents planted Victory Gardens in the grassy area where pavement today holds the Tennessee State Bank, Hardee's No. 6 and the Executive Inn.

The battle against commercial encroachment has been a continuing crusade for Lindbergh Forest residents. They've stopped several manufacturing plants, a beauty salon and even a slaughterhouse, says Proaps, but they've lost some skirmishes, too.

Now it appears they've won the war. The neighborhood was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as of Feb. 10, says Claudette Stager, staff member of the Tennessee Historic Commission. A 1994 application was recently revised and resubmitted by Ann Bennett of the Metropolitan Planning Commission, and Stager on Wednesday learned it had been approved. Homeowners will be notified within the next few weeks, Stager says.

As for placement of the official plaque, Jeff Berry of Berry Funeral Home has volunteered his family to do the job, and Vic McLean says if he's in town, he'll show up to "cut the ribbon."


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