Highland Park - Our story
Highland Park as seen from Bragg Hill on Missionary Ridge, 1887
In 1887
the now densely-populated area east of
Chattanooga's National Cemetery was "a dense thicket traversed only by a
few cow trails" when it was purchased by T.G. Montague and C.V. Brown,
mostly from a 350-acre plot owned by farmer John Divine at the base of
Missionary Ridge. The tract of land between McCallie and Union cost them a
total of $7,600. Thanks to a land "boom" in Tennessee and in the
South in general, they
divided this site into the lots
we know today and sold them each in a single day for a
total profit of around $11,000, after ensuring easy access to the land
sale by the newly-formed Union Railway, more commonly called the belt
line.
The belt line railway, formed a few years previous, helped to create Highland Park along with many of the other suburbs that sprang up out of the orchards and vineyards a short distance from downtown Chattanooga. The growth of the rail business (by 1889 the belt line had 128 round-trip passenger schedules) allowed families to travel quickly to the quiet, local suburbs just outside of downtown, and these areas - Highland Park, St. Elmo, Ridgedale, East Lake - began to be filled with a wide variety of homes and families. The growing interest in the area allowed Montague and Brown to form the Highland Park Land Company and purchase more land, an 80-acre tract that stretched all the way to Lyerly, just on the other side of Willow. This area was also cleared, separated into lots, and added to the former space.
When Ferger Place - our beautiful sister neighborhood that sits
on the National Register, and just across Main St - had just seven
houses in it, Highland Park was already filling up with families and
businesses. The growth of industrial jobs in the south allowed for
more and more home construction by middle-class families, essentially
creating the historic suburbs that surround not only Chattanooga, but
many other southern cities. Even then, while many other suburbs were
growing or being created, our neighborhood was a special one. The
Chamberlain Avenue Land Company, another real estate group formed to
promote Highland Park, called it "commanding and desirable" and "all
above overflow"
(beyond the danger of floodwaters). As even more means of public
transportation grew, residents of Highland Park even took out
injunctions to keep McCallie Avenue, "the city's only pleasure drive,"
from being torn up to create a railcar line. But more transportation was
needed - by 1890 the belt line was carrying four-thousand passengers
daily, 1,690 of them living in Highland Park. As the etching above
shows, the McCallie line was created and the neighborhood continued to
grow. Highland Park was eventually incorporated in 1904, then annexed in
1905, over one-hundred years ago.
History is ever-present in a neighborhood like ours. Below you can peek into a 1917 map of Highland Park that has been compiled from multiple micro-fiche pages of the Chattanooga Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from that year. It shows a number of Highland Park's historic homes, the old belt railway line that ran through Anderson Ave (which still runs alongside Holtzclaw, then called Cator), and truly gives a sense of what sort of residences and commercial ventures existed almost a decade ago in our neighborhood - many quite similar or the same as those we have now!
The Sanborn maps were obtained through the Hamilton County Library System and compiled into a single map - individual pages, as well as maps from other years, are available through their web site. (If your browser asks you to accept the ActiveX plugin to view the maps below, please do.)