hmm

This is a guest post by Chad Huskey.

As a kid, rid­ing up and down Chap­man High­way with my folks, we would stop in for gas at a gas station/pawn shop/jewelry store/restaurant. The sign at the road says “Thrifty Cen­ter”, but I had always heard it called Taul Town. When I was a teenager I finally thought to ask one day, what exactly a Taul Town was. Turns out I had just heard it pro­nounced with a Ten­nessean south­ern drawl for all those years, and it was actu­ally Towel Town. When the shop first opened it was a gas station/pawn shop/jewelry store/restaurant/towel empo­rium. You could fill up with gas, eat a waf­fle, buy a neck­lace, pawn your stereo, and pur­chase a hand towel in one con­ve­nient stop.

It seems peo­ple take great pride in call­ing it a name no one remem­bers, and I admit I’ve been guilty of it myself. The scene usu­ally plays out some­thing like this. “Meet me at Towel Town…Where?!…Towel Town! Where the heck is Towel Town?!…You know, the Thrifty Center…Yea I know the Thrifty Cen­ter, why did you call it Towel Town!?…What!?! You mean you’ve never heard it called Towel Town, that’s all I ever heard it called grow­ing up?” We take offense to those out­siders who haven’t heard the secret code names, of local estab­lish­ments from days gone by. At the same time we delight in fill­ing them in on the often col­or­ful his­tory of the old names, and places and how they became what they are today.

Think you’re not guilty? Do you go to East Town Mall or Knoxville Cen­ter? I hear older folks still call the shop­ping cen­ter where the Disc Exchange is, Cas Walker’s. Whole com­mu­ni­ties’ names have come and gone. Ever hear of Happy Holler near down­town or maybe Pen­nyrile in South Knoxville? We get a kick out of the igno­rance about our local sto­ries and leg­ends that make up these lost names. We feel it’s our civic duty, as native Knoxvil­lians, to fill in the out-of-towners and newly relo­cated to our “inside info”.

In truth, it’s all done in good fun, with a sense of pride about the silly lit­tle tid­bits we are privy to about our home town. We enjoy edu­cat­ing folks about things we hold onto that take us back to years ago, when these secrets were com­mon knowl­edge. When things where a bit slower, and life seemed to be a lit­tle bit more relaxed.

Makes me won­der if some­time in the early 1800s a con­ver­sa­tion ever went some­thing like this, “Meet me at James White Fort…Where?!…James White Fort! Where the heck is James White Fort?!…You know, Knoxville!”

Photo by: stri­atic