This cache, placed in James Agee Park, we hope will be the first of a series that will highlight the history of one of the oldest and most historic neighborhoods of Knoxville, Fort Sanders. We believe this is the first cache to be placed in Fort Sanders proper.
What can one say of James Agee? Born in Fort Sanders (Highland Street and James Agee Street) in 1909, lived on Highland Street most of his adolescent life, wrote about Knoxville in some of his best known work. Knoxville: Summer 1915. Also set in Knoxville and LaFollette, A Death in the Family, Pulitzer prize winning novel about the death of his father in an automobile accident that was published after his death.
Despite the widespread publicity Agee brought to Knoxville, the house where he was born and the house where he lived as a teenager are both long gone. We are left with this park, a block from his birthplace. We have as his legacy this former parking lot, championed by R.B. Morris, still a place becoming what it will become.
James Agee died at 45, of a heart attack. He left an indelible mark on Knoxville and historic Fort Sanders. For more on Agee, see the excellent online article from Metropulse, from 2001, as well as the Wikipedia article on him.
Cache is a camoed prescription bottle hidden near the stone column with the James Agee Park sign. You access the cache from the sidewalk. Use a bit of geoninjitsu here, as the man across the street spends hours and hours working in his yard, which shows in the profusion of flowers you will see behind and spilling over his wrought iron fence. This is not the letter box that is also hidden in the park, and if you find the letterbox by mistake, please do not take the stamp out of it!