Market Square: Two Centuries of Commerce

The land for Market Square was donated to the city by two local businessmen, William G. Swan and Joseph A. Mabry, and the square was established as a marketplace in eighteen fifty-four. The idea was simple: a designated place where farmers from the surrounding valleys could bring their wagons, and the city could function as the commercial hinge between the mountain agriculture to the east and south and the river trade heading west.

For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, the square operated as an outdoor farmers' market, surrounded by a ring of brick commercial buildings that still frame it today. During the Civil War, the square was used by both Confederate and Union forces as a staging ground; the occupying Union army used its buildings for supply storage. After the war, the market resumed. In eighteen ninety-seven, the city built a covered Market House at the center of the square to shelter vendors and buyers from the weather.

James Agee wrote about the square in his childhood memories of Knoxville. By the time Cormac McCarthy was walking through it in the nineteen forties and fifties, it retained the rougher edges of a working-class commercial district where the produce trucks doubled as social institutions and the surrounding bars absorbed whatever the day left over.

By the nineteen seventies and eighties, the square had declined with the rest of downtown as suburban retail drew business outward. Revitalization efforts in the nineteen nineties and two thousands brought restaurants, bars, and events programming. The weekly farmers' market resumed. The brick buildings from the mid-nineteenth century are still there.

The Market House is gone, torn down after a fire in nineteen sixty. The buildings that replaced it do not match the ones that came before. The square still functions as the city's living room, which is the oldest and most durable thing that can be said about any city square: it is where Knoxville has always gathered.