Keep Knoxville Beautiful lost one Old City mural earlier this year. The nonprofit organization has one left—an expansive depiction of a train on the side of a brick building at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Central Street—and they don’t plan to lose it.
The mural, located in the courtyard behind Lonesome Dove, commemorates the introduction of the railroad to Knoxville in the 19th century, transforming a small river town into a major wholesale center. Though the colors have faded and the paint shows cracking after years of exposure to the elements, the mural still stands as a testament to the significance of the railroad in Knoxville’s economic and cultural development.
KKB, which commissioned the piece in 2001, has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise money to restore and preserve this historic train mural. The group hopes to raise $4,500 for the cost of the supplies and work to revitalize the piece. The effort, which has raised $563 so far, began partly in response to the destruction of KKB’s other Old City piece, the Knoxville Music History Mural, in April.
That mural, at 118 E. Jackson Ave., paid homage to 41 influential Tennessee artists, including Dolly Parton, Roy Acuff, the Everly Brothers, R.B. Morris, Donald Brown, and the Tennessee Chocolate Drops. It was painted over with no notice by developer Leigh Burch, the owner of the building. Local advocates for public art, including Patience Melnik, the executive director of KKB, expressed dismay at Burch’s decision.
Five months later, Melnik says she was shocked when she heard that the music mural had been destroyed. Looking through files on the mural’s creation in 2000, Melnik says she was struck by the number of community members who worked to make the music history mural happen, from high-school students to business owners and City Council members.
In addition to brightening up areas like the Old City, Melnik says public art creates a sense of collective ownership of the city and the history that helped shape it.
“It’s there in our visual landscape, and that’s what public art is for—it’s for everyone,” Melnik says. “And so I think we all felt that it was ours, and nobody ever conceived that something like this would happen, that in one evening it would just be gone. So it was devastating.”
The train mural has experienced significant deterioration since it was created, but the building where it is displayed has recently changed hands. Melnik says the new owners, Laura and Shawn Lyke, support KKB’s efforts to restore the train mural.
“With this kind of thing, it’s a stitch-in-time-saves-nine kind of situation where it’s just going to become more and more costly and difficult to repair the more faded it gets,” Melnik says. “So we just wanted to make sure that we take good care of it.”
The train mural will be fixed and repainted by Walt Fieldsa, the original designer of both the music history and train murals. In a video explaining the planned restoration, Fieldsa discussed the importance of public art in Knoxville.
“Every town I’ve been in that has had murals has always had a very healthy and vibrant social community, and I think that that is one of the key things to having public art,” Fieldsa says.
Melnik says she knows the community will be able to raise the needed funds for the project, but she hopes they can restore the piece sooner rather than later.
“Some of the things in our community we just really don’t appreciate until they’re gone,” Melnik says. “So I hope that people can rally around and actually take that moment to pull out their phone or get on their computer and actually make that donation, whether it’s $5 or $500. It all helps.
“It could be lost, so I hope that people will rally around it.”
Hayley Brundige is a writer and forever-intern studying Journalism and Public Policy at UT. Her work has been featured in Scalawag Magazine and Inverse. She might use you to get closer to your dog.
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