Early St. Elmo and Chattanooga
Up until 1838, the Tennessee River was the dividing line between Hamilton County and the Cherokee country. That year, the community of Ross's Landing was surveyed, and in 1839 the village of Chattanooga was established near the fork with Chickamauga Creek. In 1840, the state of Tennessee began to sell the property formerly owned by the Cherokees at the rate of $7.50 an acre. Much of the Tennessee side of Lookout Mountain and the surrounding land was purchased by the Whiteside and Cravens families.
The area at the foot of Lookout Mountain was acquired shortly after the Civil War by Colonel Abraham Malone Johnson and his wife, Thankful Whiteside Johnson. In 1885, Colonel Johnson divided his farm into residential and commercial lots. The name "St. Elmo" was taken from the title of a novel written by Augusta J. Evans Wilson, who had spent several summers on Lookout Mountain and found the view similar to that of St. Elmo Castle in Naples, Italy. Her book, St. Elmo, was published in 1866, and ultimately rivaled Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in impact and influence. St. Elmo became one of the top three best-selling novels of the nineteenth century.
Read more about this topic: St. Elmo Historic District (Chattanooga, Tennessee)
Famous quotes containing the words early st, early and/or chattanooga:
“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pardon me boy,
Is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo?
Track twenty nine,
Boy you can give me a shine.”
—Mack Gordon (1904–1959)