St. Elmo Historic District (Chattanooga, Tennessee)
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (March 2014) |
St. Elmo Historic District | |
Location | Chattanooga, Tennessee |
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Coordinates | 34°59′43″N 85°16′49″W / 34.99528°N 85.28028°W |
Built | 1885 |
Architect | Various |
Architectural style | Victorian and Victorian bungalow |
NRHP reference No. | 82003976 |
Added to NRHP | April 4, 1992[1] |
The St. Elmo Historic District, or St. Elmo for short, is a neighborhood in the city of
Hundreds of properties in the neighborhood were listed on the National Register in 1982, and in 1996 St. Elmo was designated a Local Historic District. Many of the buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century have been preserved. A St. Elmo resident is an 'Elmoian'.
Settlement
In 1776, Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe and several hundred Cherokee warriors migrated to Chickamauga Creek after objecting to a treaty between other Cherokees and American land speculators and promising active resistance. They became known as the Chickamaugas, and eventually moved farther down the Tennessee River below The Suck; to the other end of the Tennessee River Gorge. There they built the "Five Lower Towns" at Running Water (now Whiteside) and further downriver. Between 1777 and 1782, the so-called "Chickamaugas" also had a town called Tsatanugi (or Chatanuga, based on the Muscogee word cvto - rock), near here along Chattanooga Creek.
Daniel Ross, a young Scottish immigrant, came to the area in 1785 and worked at a trading post with John McDonald, the area's first businessman. Ross married McDonald's daughter and the two built a house in what was to become St. Elmo after the
Early St. Elmo and Chattanooga
Up until 1838, the Tennessee River was the dividing line between Hamilton County and the Cherokee country. That year, the community of Ross's Landing was surveyed, and in 1839 the village of Chattanooga was established north of the mouth of Chattanooga Creek. In 1840, the state of Tennessee began to sell the property formerly owned by the Cherokees at the rate of $7.50 an acre.
James Whiteside purchased 5,000 acres of land, including most of the northern end of Lookout Mountain. To encourage tourism, Whiteside built a turnpike up the mountain and a three-story hotel for tourists, which opened in 1855. Among the visitors was young writer
Yellow fever and urban development
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Until the 1880s, the area at the foot of Lookout Mountain remained primarily a wooded area. The real boom in the growth of St. Elmo as a residential community coincided with the planning and development of the
Connecting St. Elmo to Chattanooga
The trolley was not the only transportation development to influence the history of St. Elmo. In 1887, the
In 1905, St. Elmo was incorporated and a town commission was formed for the purpose of securing funding for a school. A bond was issued, and work on the building was completed at the end of 1906. The small brick building replaced St. Elmo's first school, established in 1891.
It wasn't until 1926 that a direct route was established between St. Elmo and Chattanooga. The city wanted to provide a thoroughfare to St. Elmo and Lookout Mountain, but Broad Street ended abruptly at Ninth Street (now Martin Luther King Boulevard),[4] terminating at a railroad station owned by the State of Georgia. Negotiations to open a passageway for a road through the south side had failed over the years. Chattanooga Commissioner Ed Bass took matters into his own hands on the night of May 6, when he and a crew of city workers bulldozed enough of the buildings to establish a right-of-way for cars. The city got its road, and eventually Georgia sold the rest of its holdings in the area.
References
- ^ "NPS Focus". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
- ^ Gay, Morgan Moore. "Moore: How the St. Elmo community got its name". Chattanooga Times Free Press. No. 17 May 2015. Chattanooga Times Free Press Inc. Retrieved 5 October 2020.
- ^ McKee, Kathryn B. (2004). "Book Review: A Southern Woman of Letters: The Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson". The Mississippi Quarterly. 57 (2): 336–338.
- ^ Chattanooga Department of Transportation. "E. Martin Luther King Blvd. Improvements". City of Chattanooga. Archived from the original on 2019-04-04. Retrieved 2020-08-27.
External links
- St. Elmo Historic District official website
- St. Elmo Flickr Photo Group
- A Visual History St. Elmo Yesterday and Today
- St. Elmo Historic District on LocalWiki
- [1] List of St. Elmo Historic Addresses - Use to confirm if a St. Elmo house is actually historical, or not.