History lies dreaming in the April sunshine…
There is an old manuscript in the special collections of the downtown library, written by a man named Henry Wiltse. The manuscript has been cheaply bound and the pages are type-written and brittle. It is a collection of historical notes and fragments of an unfinished history of Chattanooga.
Wiltse never completed the history but his notes are still there. The book smells musty and secretly alive. In those pages are bits of letters written to Wiltse by a man who was among the first white men to call this land along the river home.
Andy Williams was his name. The year was 1835. Andy was a young boy when he stepped off a boat with his father at John Ross’s Landing. A white ferryman’s cabin was on the other side of the river. The government had granted Andy’s father an “occupant’s right” to a hilly stretch of land a few miles east of Ross’s Landing.
His father built a small cabin near where Bushtown now is and planted corn in a valley there. Atop and over the sides of a strange looking, one-hundred-foot-tall knoll known as Indian Hill he planted fruit trees. The corn in the valley did well but it was the orchard that was most impressive and Indian Hill eventually became known as Orchard Knob.
The earliest thing Andy remembered when he came here was the Indian tents, he said, which were “thicker than trees.” From strangers the boy heard weird Indian stories about a stretch of turbulent water downriver called the Narrows that the natives said was controlled by spirits.
A Cherokee named Dragging Canoe stalked the forests looking to kill the invading white men. River pirates hid in caves up and down the water. These stories haunted Andy and added the bit of danger that is always necessary in any young boy’s reckoning of paradise.
To Andy this new land truly a paradise. One of his letters to Henry Wiltse describes the landscape around Orchard Knob when he first arrived here with his father:
The spies that Moses sent to search the land of Canaan could not have found a more beautiful valley, with everything to sustain life either growing or running wild in the woods. There was a sycamore that stood just below the fork of Citico Creek, which at the height of twenty or twenty-five feet had three prongs, and when I saw it, it had a door just large enough so a man could go through. We cut the door large enough so a horse could go in, turn around and come out, and I kept dry there out of many a summer shower of rain.
Of good things to eat that grew were the May-apple, the hazelnut, walnut, muscadine, winter grape, and mulberry. The wild plum trees grew in clusters. The plums were not so large as some of the tame ones, but were the most delicious I ever ate. Around these hills and knobs grew the sugar, red and black haw, the summer grape, the persimmon and prickly pear. And in the black glades, wild onion by the bushel.
Of four footed beasts, there was everything from the little striped ground squirrel to the rabbit and deer. Among the squirrels, the gray squirrel was the most. We never thought of a pet squirrel. They were so plentiful they were all pets.
Of the feathered tribe was from the little tomtit to the turkey. The wild pigeon would come in the fall after the mast, until I have seen acres covered in a flutter with them. The wild goose came from the cold north in droves and would often stop and winter with us. The buzzards would sail around in front of a summer cloud. I have seen the sky darkened by crows going to their roosts on the mountains and coming off in the morning.
The next structure nearest to Andy’s home was Straw Tavern. It was run by a man named Pryor. The tavern stood at what is now the corner of Vine and Willow streets. Andy came along when his father would carry fruit and corn to Pryor and later said that “Hell Hole” might have been a better name for the place. There was whiskey to be had, he said, and the area’s only deck of cards. A pack of loud baying hounds was kept out back. Andy knew of at least one murder that had been committed there.
There were also rumors of buried treasure. It was whispered around “Hell Hole” that a man named W.D. Fulton, a bank cashier, secretly buried a large amount of gold somewhere on Orchard Knob. This Mr. Fulton then left the area and mysteriously had never returned. The tales of this hidden cache of gold brought men from near and far hoping to find the buried loot. One such group of men, searching the orchard by moonlight, found a strange and unnatural indentation in the ground.
At this place the men began digging hard, believing that they had finally found the spot. These treasure-seekers were convinced that each shovel full of dirt they cast away was bringing them closer to the gold. One of the men’s shovels struck something hard and hollow. They all threw their shovels aside and began digging with their hands. They lifted the object from the ground and brushed the dirt away. But what they found was not a box full of gold.
To their horror and dismay, the men had uncovered the skull of the man who had been murdered at the Straw Tavern. He had been buried amongst the fruit trees one night on Orchard knob. The men threw the skull on the ground and ran quickly back to their wives, not even bothering to rebury the bones of the poor man they had unearthed.
Chattanooga grew quickly during those early years. Roads were scraped out of the mud and churches were raised. More people were stepping off boats at Ross’s Landing every week. Boys and girls grew up and new children were born. Schoolhouses were built and teachers were brought to town to teach the children their three R’s.
In another letter Andy told a story of one of those new school teachers. He was a young man named Sam Morris. One afternoon Sam and a few young ladies went for a stroll over Orchard Knob. In those days school teachers were expected to be perpetually unwed so that their lives could be devoted to their students. Sam had come to enjoy the benefits of unmarried life. He strolled most poetically that evening around the fruit trees, delighting the young ladies with tales of old philosophies and strange, faraway places as they followed close behind. He smiled confidently and the eyelashes of the blushing ladies waved at him.
After a while they all came upon a nest of baby nightingales in one of the fruit trees. Sam took the small birds from their nest and placed them gently in the young ladies hands. The girls swooned and sighed at Sam and the little birds. Of course, they had all heard the nightingale’s singing but had most likely never held the song in their hands. Sam laughed and the women adored him.
As they walked on something odd laying on the ground caught Sam’s eye and he knelt down. He leaned looking close at the earth. The ladies peeked over his shoulders asking what he had found now. When he rose and turned back to them he held the skull of the poor man who had been murdered at Straw Tavern and unearthed by the treasure-seekers. The ladies gasped in fear, but Sam told them not to run away.
He took the baby birds from their hands and placed them inside the dead man’s skull. Sam laughed again. The haunted young ladies whispered amongst themselves and the nightingales began singing again. Evening had fallen. The school teacher Sam Morris calmed the ladies and they followed him again to a quieter side of Orchard Knob.
As further years passed people continued stepping off boats and rafts with their families at Ross’s Landing. They walked into the valleys and hills surrounding the river and made this land their home. The small town that grew up around Ross’s Landing eventually became the city of Chattanooga. The wilds along the river became civilized and through all this Orchard Knob remained as Andy’s father made it. That big, strange hill covered with fruit trees to the east of town helped feed them everyone. Until “the War” came.
It was 99 years after Andy died, almost to the day, that I came upon these fragments in that dusty library book. The last thing I read before returning the book was a bit of one other letter he’d written to Henry Wiltse. Henry had sent Andy questions about the Union occupation of Orchard Knob during the Civil War. Andy responded as best he could with his memories of cold soldiers and dead horses on the side of the hill.
Ulysses S. Grant had occupied Orchard Knob during the war. Andy had heard the cannons and seen the dying and starving men. He remembered what he could to help the inquisitive historian. But suddenly Andy dismissed all these horror stories and asked Henry not to ask him about war anymore.
“Let me return to my childhood days at Orchard Knob,” he wrote. “It was there that I tugged my sled up and slid down a thousand times. It was at this knob that I sat and listened to the bark of the squirrel, and woke up the whippoorwills as they sailed around, and heard them make their peculiar cries in the air. It was here that I listened to the deep basso profundo of the bullfrog, and now and then heard the hoot of a wise old owl away down in the bottoms. It was here, under the trees, that I used to dream of years to come.”
This is as far as Andy’s letters to Henry Wiltse go. How he went on with the rest of his days is unsure. These small anecdotes are all there is—little bits of letters in which an old man remembered his boyhood home. Andy died on August 14th, 1913, having never travelled too far from that old hill where his father planted an orchard.
Passing time brought what society calls Progress. Trees fell and mountains were leveled. Houses and storefronts grew out of the mud. Slaves were brought in to the city “where corn meets cotton”, as the newspapers boasted, and more crops grew in the valleys.
Sheriffs and judges were sent in to create order out of the chaos of new men trying to tame wild land. Railroads came hollering through the mountain bringing politicians, laws, and gallows. Fevers and disease came up the river. It is doubtful that these were the dreams of the young boy who stepped off a boat at Ross’s Landing and walked into wild hope with his father.
The fruit trees on Orchard Knob are not there anymore. These days when Orchard Knob is mentioned an apple orchard is not what comes to mind. Orchard Knob is the name of the neighborhood surrounding the hill.
It’s said that decent people only go to there to buy things they don’t need. Cops are familiar with the area. The most naive modern-day gentrifiers won’t even touch the place now.
The actual hill that was once covered in fruit trees, the real Orchard Knob, is now a monument to the Civil War. The same war Andy dismissed in his letter to remember the land he grew up on. For some reason Chattanooga has acquired a great fondness for the part it played in “the War”, as it’s still often called, at the expense of a place as strangely romantic as Andy’s Orchard Knob. It seems sad atop that hill today and brings to mind the old poet Omar Khayyam who sang:
Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows?
Where have all those old things gone? Some old Buddha-man said that you can never put your hand in the same river twice. What’s past is gone forever, they say, and maybe that’s true. If so, it would be good if that same brutal and fleeting time could wear down those silly monuments to dead soldiers and their vulgar wars a bit faster.
It’s strange the things society honors. Where a boy and his father planted hope and fruit trees, where young girls once promenaded in their Summer dresses and sun bonnets, there is nothing for them there anymore.
The place where the young ladies went strolling with the dandy school teacher and where young Andy Williams ran through summer nights and laid on his back to hear the whippoorwills and watch fireflies and the moon, there’s no monument to any of them.
That place, old Orchard Knob, is now littered with broken beer bottles, larger-than-life stone soldiers, overgrown grass, and American flags.