On your left, you will spot a grand red brick building anchored by a three-story corner tower with a pitched clay-tile roof and a bright red L-and-N sign jutting out from the facade.
We just walked away from the Sunsphere, a beacon of the 1980s, to stand before a survivor from 1905. The story of this city is an endless wrestling match between the urge to tear the old blocks down and the stubborn will to adapt and protect them. This building, the L and N Station, is a masterclass in survival.
It was built by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad after a bitter corporate rivalry. In 1894, L and N executives made a handshake deal with the Southern Railway not to encroach on each other's territory. When Southern broke that agreement, L and N retaliated by building a direct line from Cincinnati to Atlanta, straight through Knoxville.
To appreciate what makes this place special, you have to look at the puzzle its chief engineer had to solve. Richard Montfort was an Irish immigrant and a graduate of Dublin's Royal College of Science. It is always worth remembering the hidden hands of immigrant architects and laborers who laid the structural bones of the American railroad.
Montfort designed this as a stub-end terminal, which was an absolute operational nightmare. Because trains could not simply pass through the station on a continuous track, they had to pull past, turn around on a remote, Y-shaped section of track, and then carefully back the passenger cars into the unloading area behind the building. When it was time to leave, the train just pulled straight forward. It was a tedious, highly complicated dance of multi-ton steel machines.
Montfort gave the station a chateauesque exterior. That is an architectural style designed to mimic grand French manor houses. But inside, the design reflected a much uglier reality. The interior featured a general waiting room and a separate colored waiting room. This was an enforcement of Jim Crow, the harsh legal and social system of racial segregation in the South. Those separate facilities remained rigidly in place until the civil rights movement forced integration.
In 1915, author James Agee walked past this very station and wrote that its stained glass smoldered like an exhausted butterfly. By 1968, the last passenger train backed out of that terminal forever. A lot of old depots met the wrecking ball shortly after. But this building refused to be erased. It was renovated to house restaurants for the 1982 World's Fair, and today, after a 5.6 million dollar renovation, it is the L and N STEM Academy, a magnet high school.
The students here are incredibly ambitious. A group of them recently designed an experiment using cornstarch to test human waste disposal in space. The first unmanned rocket carrying their project actually exploded six seconds into flight, a massive fireball that students felt from over a mile away. But true to this building's spirit, they rebuilt it, and the second launch was a success.
We are leaving the meticulous blueprints of the rail age behind us now. Our next stop is about an 18-minute walk away, where the story shifts to the bloody, chaotic battlegrounds of the Civil War. Let us head toward Fort Sanders.
