page_title: Fort Sanders, Knoxville
section_title: A Death in the Family
hierarchical_section_title: Fort Sanders, Knoxville / History / A Death in the Family
caption_attribution_description: English: James Agee Park along Laurel Avenue in the Fort Sanders neighborhood of Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The park was once the site of house owned by Knoxville mayor Samuel B. Luttrell. The author, James Agee, lived nearby.
context_page_description: Fort Sanders is a neighborhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, located west of the downtown area and immediately north of the main campus of the University of Tennessee. Developed in the late 19th century as a residential area for Knoxville's growing upper and middle classes, the neighborhood now provides housing primarily for the university's student population. The neighborhood still contains a notable number of its original Victorian-era houses and other buildings, several hundred of which were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 as the Fort Sanders Historic District.
  Fort Sanders is named for a Civil War-era Union bastion that once stood near the center of the neighborhood, which was the site of a key engagement in 1863. In the 1880s, several of Knoxville's wealthier residents built sizeable houses in what is now the southern half of Fort Sanders, then known as "White's Addition," while the northern half, known as "Ramsey's Addition," was developed to provide housing for plant managers and workers employed in factories along Second Creek. Fort Sanders was incorporated as the separate city of West Knoxville in 1888, and was annexed by Knoxville in 1897.
context_section_description: Author James Agee (1909–1955) spent his early childhood in the Fort Sanders neighborhood.  The Agees initially lived at 1505 Highland Avenue (the house is no longer standing), but moved to Laurel Avenue after the death of Agee's father in 1915.  Agee's maternal grandparents, Joel and Emma Tyler, lived on Clinch Avenue.  Joel Tyler was a cofounder of the mill machinery company Ty-Sa-Man, where Agee's father worked.
  The Fort Sanders neighborhood provides the primary setting for Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family.  The novel opens with Agee and his father taking a walk through downtown Knoxville, making stops on Gay Street and Market Square, and passing the Deaf and Dumb Asylum and the L&N Station as they made their way back to Fort Sanders.  Agee mentioned a vacant lot along Forest Avenue where he and his father liked to look out on the lights of North Knoxville in the distance, and listen to the engines of the L&N, which "coughed and browsed" in the valley below.  The book ends with Agee and his uncle conversing while standing over the "waste of briers and of embanked clay" of the ruins of the Civil War-era Fort Sanders.
  In 1999, Fifteenth Street was renamed "James Agee Street."  In 2005, James Agee Park was established in a vacant lot (formerly the home of Mayor Samuel B. Luttrell) at the intersection of James Agee Street and Laurel Avenue.
caption: James Agee Park on Laurel
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