Yellow Fever and Urban Development
A yellow fever epidemic in Chattanooga caused an exodus in 1878. Almost 12,000 people fled the city, many going to Lookout Mountain. At the time, the mountain was accessible on the north side only by a four-hour trip up the old Whiteside Turnpike, which was built in the 1850s and cost a toll of two dollars. Complaints about the toll led to the 1879 construction of the St. Elmo Turnpike, which had an easier grade and a lower toll (the St. Elmo turnpike was paved and renamed the Adolphus S. Ochs Highway in the late 1920s).
Until the 1880s, the area at the foot of Lookout Mountain remained primarily a wooded area. The real boom in the growth of St. Elmo as a residential community coincided with the planning and development of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, which was dedicated in 1890. At the time, St. Elmo saw development resulting from both a general real estate and construction boom in the South and the 1893 expansion of an electric trolley from Chattanooga to St. Elmo.
Read more about this topic: St. Elmo Historic District (Chattanooga, Tennessee)
Famous quotes containing the words yellow, fever, urban and/or development:
“Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:—
So many times do I love again.”
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849)
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.”
—George Chauncey, U.S. educator, author. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, p. 1, Basic Books (1994)
“I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)