Last Thursday, the University of Tennessee officially started construction on the future Mossman Building on White Avenue.
The new $96 million science facility will house laboratories and classrooms for the departments of microbiology, biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, psychology and nutrition.
If all you read was the press release, you may have thought it was just a simple groundbreaking ceremony, yet another addition to UT’s seemingly endless wave of construction.
Mossman is being built on the site of three historic Fort Sanders houses, all of which held a special history with UT and the city of Knoxville. In 2000, UT struck an agreement with local preservation groups mapping out parts of Fort Sanders it will never expand into—a deal it blatantly ignored with the removal of the Victorian-era houses.
Despite numerous appeals from the community and White Avenue residents themselves to not destroy the houses, UT pushed forward anyway.
While the house at 1302 White Avenue – built in the 1890s for Cooper D. Schmitt, the first Dean of the College of Arts and Science, and his son, Bernadotte Schmitt, himself a Rhodes Scholar and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian – was saved and moved a block north, the other two houses and the history they were apart of, were less fortunate.
The middle house at 1308 White Avenue was known as the “Judge’s House” after Judge Charles Hayes Brown, who served as chancellor of UT from 1920 to 1926.
The last house at 1312 White Avenue was home to Dr. Charles Edward Ferris (1864-1951), the first dean of the College of Engineering and arguably one of the most important men on the UT campus in the early 20th Century.
For 50 years, Ferris served our university, guiding it into a new era and adding many of the features that make our school what it is today.
At the request of his superiors, Ferris formed the first campus bookstore, created a special engineering reference book to raise money to build the road in front of Estabrook Hall and created the marble columns that still guard the entrance to the Hill (In an interview, Ferris said he added to a time capsule that is still underneath the west column).
The late Professor Nathan Dougherty once remarked that, “Dean Ferris was more than dean of engineering- he was the dean of almost anything.”
Ferris’ presence is still felt today. Aside from his namesake building on the Hill, Ferris created the real estate company that bought the land for what is now Neyland Stadium. Work was postponed due to the First World War, but in 1921, Shields-Watkins Field opened, thanks in large part to the student body, which was given a break from classes to build the field itself.
How ironic that Ferris was central in creating one of the most recognizable structures in our state, yet his own home was destroyed by the university he spent his life serving.
While the loss of the White Avenue houses was completely avoidable, there are other ways of remembering our history.
It’s natural to be saddened when we lose something special. But that doesn’t mean we should lose hope. I wish my state was not trying to privatize its support services, but I am still a Tennessean. I was disappointed in my university when we lost those houses, but I am still a Volunteer, and as such, it is still my duty to act like one and pay service to UT.
Service doesn’t mean blindly accepting everything that we are told by the university. Service can be anything, like running student government, making a satirical newspaper or marching through campus to raise awareness about sexual assault. And no, we don’t have to create the next new stadium on campus to be a servant to UT. The simple act of working toward something greater than ourselves is service.
It was the idea of service that drove Ferris to give his life to UT, not money, fame or a building named after him.
Ferris’ home is gone. That cannot be undone, but he left behind more than a house. He showed what it meant to be a Volunteer, and how someone can actually give their all for Tennessee. And that’s much more important than a collection of wood and nails.
McCord Pagan is a fifth-year senior in journalism and electronic media. He can be reached at [email protected].
