Jack Neely

1 week ago | visitknoxville.com | Jack Neely

The site of this month’s Visit Knoxville Open is one of the most beautiful golf courses in the region, on the banks of the Holston River. Now almost a century old, Holston Hills is also one of the most historic courses in Tennessee. Golf was catching on around the world in the 1890s when Knoxville’s first golf course, a nine-holer, emerged not far from Holston Hills, near what’s now Chilhowee Park.

2 weeks ago | citylifestyle.com | Paul James |Jack Neely

Article by Paul James and Jack NeelyPhotography by Knoxville History Project, Shawn Poynter, and the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection Originally published in West Knoxville LifestyleThis is the second part of a look at the city’s deep and endlessly fascinating musical history based on the publication of a new educational booklet by the Knoxville History Project.

3 weeks ago | visitknoxville.com | Jack Neely

In and around Knoxville is an array of photogenic historic homes, houses noted for their age, architecture, and stories of the people who lived there. No two are very much alike. Some have been known and respected as house museums for almost a century, while another is a relatively recent addition. As it happens, few of them are in the same neighborhood, and several are out of the way, and require cars and good directions. But they’re all worth seeing.

4 weeks ago | visitknoxville.com | Jack Neely

This April marks the 160th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. By the time Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in a meeting more than 300 miles northeast of here at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, things had been pretty quiet in Knoxville for more than a year. Longstreet’s Confederates, after their disastrously ill-advised attack on Fort Sanders, had given up on their siege of Knoxville in late 1863.

2 months ago | visitknoxville.com | Jack Neely

After 150 years of envying the Gulf Coast Mardi Gras, we finally created our own version of it—and brought the dogs! Mardi Growl’s history is pretty recent and easy to track. Inspired by a similar event in St. Louis, it started in 2008, and has been a colorful, popular, and often a joyfully noisy spectacle, delighting dogs of all sizes, shapes, and colors, as well as a certain number of humans.