page_title: Sequoyah Hills, Knoxville
section_title: Early development
hierarchical_section_title: Sequoyah Hills, Knoxville / History / Early development
caption_attribution_description: English: The "old" Cherokee Country Club in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, photographed circa 1910. This building was demolished and replaced by the current clubhouse in 1928. Original image cropped to show more detail of the building.
context_page_description: Sequoyah Hills is a neighborhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. It is located off Kingston Pike between the city's downtown area and West Knoxville. Initially developed in the 1920s, Sequoyah Hills was one of Knoxville's first suburbs, and today is home to some of the city's most affluent residents. The neighborhood contains numerous notable examples of mid-20th century residential architecture, with houses designed by architects such as Charles I. Barber, Benjamin McMurry, and Francis Keally. Sequoyah Hills is named for the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee alphabet.
  Originally an agrarian area known as Looney's Bend, the modern Sequoyah Hills neighborhood is largely rooted in the development efforts of 1920s-era visionary entrepreneurs E. V. Ferrell, who developed the Scenic Drive area, and Robert L. Foust, who established the "Talahi" subdivision in the vicinity of Cherokee Boulevard and Talahi Drive. Foust and Ferrell advertised their respective developments as utopian getaways where Knoxville's elite could escape from the ills of congested city life.
context_section_description: In 1890, Francis Huger, superintendent of the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railway, acquired over 450 acres (180 ha) in Sequoyah Hills with the intent of moving a steel mill to the area.  The Panic of 1893 doomed this venture, however, and the land was distributed to Huger's creditors in 1908.  Knox County road commissioner Peter Blow (1854–1945) built a house on the south bank of the river opposite Sequoyah Hills in 1910, where he operated a ferry.  Blow's Ferry Road, which connected the ferry to Kingston Pike, is believed to have been built along a trail that once accessed a cemetery containing the graves of Civil War soldiers and slaves.
  In 1907, several Knoxville businessmen established the Cherokee Country Club on Lyon's View Pike, and erected a clubhouse on a hill with a commanding view of the river valley and the Great Smoky Mountains beyond.  This original clubhouse was eventually demolished, and replaced with the current building, designed by the noted Knoxville architectural firm Baumann and Baumann, in 1928.  In 1913, trolley tracks were extended along Kingston Pike to its Lyon's View Pike junction, aiding in the development of the area.  What is now Sequoyah Hills was annexed by Knoxville in 1917.
  With the advent of the automobile, affluent Knoxvillians began fleeing the congested urban neighborhoods for more spacious areas on the city's periphery.  By 1920, several elegant residences, such as the H.L. Dulin House (1915) on Kingston Pike and the C. Powell Smith (1913) and E.C. Mahan (1920) residences on Lyon's View Pike, had been built near Sequoyah Hills.  In 1921, Regal Manufacturing president S. D. Coykendall commissioned noted Knoxville architectural firm Barber & McMurry to build a house on what is now Scenic Drive.
caption: The "old" Cherokee Country Club, circa 1910
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