Lindbergh Forest: Knoxville's First Automobile Suburb
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
The neighborhood tucked into the South Knoxville hillside off Chapman Highway carries a name that pins it precisely to a single year in American culture. Lindbergh Forest was developed beginning in nineteen twenty-nine, the year that Charles Lindbergh was the most famous human being alive. His solo transatlantic flight two years earlier had made him a global icon, and developers across the country seized on his name as a selling point. Buy a house in Lindbergh Forest and associate yourself with that spirit of modern adventure.
But the neighborhood's real significance is architectural and social rather than nominal. Lindbergh Forest was one of Knoxville's first automobile suburbs, a development made possible and practical by the Henley Street Bridge, which opened in nineteen thirty-one and connected South Knoxville to the urban core. Before that bridge, South Knoxville was functionally isolated. Afterward, a commuter could live among the wooded ridges across the river and reach downtown in minutes.
The development was built by Victor McClain on land purchased from Samuel Luttrell, and the houses he put up reflect the eclectic tastes of the late twenties and early thirties: Tudor Revival cottages with steeply pitched roofs, Spanish Revival stucco houses with arched entries, Colonial Revival symmetry in red brick, and two surviving examples of the Lustron house, an unusual postwar steel prefabricated home that was manufactured in an Ohio factory and assembled on-site.
During the nineteen thirties three separate mayors of Knoxville lived in Lindbergh Forest, which suggests both the neighborhood's respectability and its proximity to city hall. The houses here also made distinctive use of East Tennessee marble in their detailing, a local material that Knoxville's marble industry made widely available at reasonable cost.
The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-eight, thirty-eight houses and ten garages recognized as an intact record of early automobile-era suburban life.
