Blount Mansion | Knoxville, Tennessee

The Society has yet to visit Knoxville’s Blount (pronounced “Blunt”) Mansion. It achieved lead article attention, however, in the Winter-Spring 2020 issue of Magnolia. The title “Blount Mansion: An Urban Oasis in Knoxville” captures why it is important both to residents of the East Tennessee city and to students of southern gardens in general. A National Historic Landmark, Blount Mansion joins various other historic places with early buildings set in a twentieth-century landscape. The late eighteenth-century house, built above the Tennessee River, belonged to eastern North Carolina native and Revolutionary-era leader William Blount (1749-1800). Named Southwest Territory governor in 1790, Blount helped to found Knoxville and, in 1796, the state of Tennessee.

Blount’s home survived under private ownership until a 1925 demolition threat led to its acquisition by the DAR. While a Blount Mansion Association (BMA) was quickly formed, limited funds were directed to the house, which soon became a museum. However, it took years and a strong BMA-Knoxville Garden Club (KGC) partnership before the grounds took shape. Thus, major improvements only occurred after World War II.

A series of nationally recognized landscape professionals provided inspiration and direction, starting with Cornell graduate (and likely Bryant Fleming student) William Chase Pitkin, Jr., whose garden design was installed in 1947. A decade later, kitchen reconstruction demanded garden changes, thus bringing in Colonial Williamsburg’s Alden Hopkins. His name is synonymous with Colonial Revival design; Hopkins simplified the garden for easier maintenance while applying his interpretation of eighteenth-century planting practices. Hopkins died before the plan could be implemented, but the BMA-KGC fortunately partnered with his Williamsburg colleague Donald Parker to oversee the changes. Retaining elements of Pitkin’s design, the grounds relied heavily on brick paths and boxwood to provide general structure and definition.

The 1960s saw the expansion of the property to include the 1818 Craighead-Jackson House. Grounds improvements faltered until the Knoxville Garden Study Club (under the umbrella of KGC) asked the highly successful Atlanta landscape architect Edith Harrison Henderson to produce a garden design for the small Craighead-Jackson site. Formal at its core, Henderson’s plan centered on a semi-circular box parterre set against a backdrop of native trees and infilled with various colorful plantings.

Credit goes to the Blount Mansion Association and the Knoxville Garden Club (and Study Group) for engaging some of the best garden design experts in practice. In the process, they have used a small spot of ground to craft a multilayered cultural landscape history lesson.

For further details, visit: https://blountmansion.org/