Cal Johnson, Freed Slave & Businessman

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The son of Harriet and Cupid Johnson.
His first marriage was to Miss Mary Alice Hayes on December 23, 1875. Alice was born in Virginia in December 1847.
Mr. Johnson's second marriage was to Maggie Erwin. Miss Erwin was 33 years younger than Calvin.

Born a slave and once a drunk, the 80-year-old died Knoxville's richest and one of Tennessee's wealthiest African Americans. The Knoxville Sentinel's front-page obit noted that Johnson's fortune — made mostly in real estate and racehorses — was estimated between $300,000 and $500,000. The obituary also noted Johnson was generous, donating land and money to "give parks and other facilities to his people."

In 1897 the then 53-year-old businessman put his life in perspective to an unnamed Knoxville Sentinel reporter. The reporter's three-column story on Johnson was headlined "A Man's Success."

"I started out when many were prejudiced against my color, and when it looked like the negroes had been set free just to starve. But I went to work, and I don't mean to brag at all when I say that I have done pretty well, I think," said Johnson.

Born at the corner of Gay Street and Church Avenue, Johnson was the son of slaves Cupid and Harriet Johnson. They were property of Knoxville's wealthy McClung family. As a teen Johnson moved to the McClung farm in the Campbell Station area to care for its horses.

During the Civil War Johnson served then Union soldier and later Knoxville saloonkeeper Patrick Sullivan. Sullivan's own 1925 obit noted he'd outlived everyone who served under him in the war, quoting Sullivan that Johnson was "one of my best team drivers. He used to carry messages to my wife during the war."

When the war was over Johnson was a free man. Accounts of his life published years later aren't exactly clear on the timeline of events just after the war. For some time, he worked as a cook, first at Knoxville's Lamar House and then in Chattanooga's Lookout Mountain area. He returned to Knoxville "with a few dollars in his pocket," he told the Sentinel reporter years later, looking for other work.

He got the task of overseeing other former slaves burying Union dead in the National Cemetery established in 1863 in Knoxville. That apparently led to Johnson getting a contract with the government to reinter Union fallen in the cemetery. During the war soldiers were often buried in hastily dug graves near battlefields in East Tennessee; their bodies were being located and moved to the cemetery.

The 1897 newspaper story noted Johnson was employed by the U.S. government to "gather dead bodies throughout this region and convey them here for burial." Other accounts say the work included moving bodies of soldiers who died in battles in the Cumberland Gap area to the Knoxville graveyard.

That gruesome work gave Johnson money to buy a horse and a dray. A few years later he opened a grocery store on Gay Street. After three years he sold that business.

By the mid-1870s, he began drinking heavily. He'd decided, the 1897 newspaper article said, "to enjoy life. But he got to drinking and for three years he was an inveterate drunkard, during which time he spent every dollar he had." Penniless and without work, the article characterized Johnson as "almost a beggar on the streets."

But Johnson stopped drinking and got back to work. He worked again as a cook, then a bartender. He never drank again, worked hard, saved his money and went into the saloon business. Eventually he'd own three saloons, a racetrack and racehorses. His land holdings included rental houses and downtown buildings. He also served as a city alderman. While he couldn't read or write, he reportedly in later years used a stamp to mark his name on documents.

Twice married and childless, Johnson often used his wealth to help others. He donated land for the first YMCA for African Americans and supported the local orphanage that cared for black children.

In 1922 the city created a park along what's now Hall of Fame Drive and named it for Johnson. He helped, giving money for lights, sidewalks, a flagpole and a large fountain for the park.

Signs of Cal Johnson's work and philanthropic ventures remain. His oval Burlington horse racetrack is now a street named Speedway Circle. Along State Street a tall red brick building he built about 1898 as a clothing factory still stands but is on Knox Heritage's "Fragile Fifteen" list of area endangered structures. Though some of Cal Johnson Park was taken for interstate access ramps and its fountain is gone, the rest of the park and the 1957 Cal Johnson Recreation Center remain along Hall of Fame Drive.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Johnson_%28businessman%29

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Cal Johnson was born to Cupid and Harriet Johnson in Knoxville on October 14, 1844. The Johnson family, slaves of Colonel Pless McClung, lived on the site of the old Farragut Hotel Building at the corner of Gay and Church Streets. In his early teens, Johnson moved to McClung's Campbell Station estate, where he tended his master's horses and developed a lifelong interest in horses.

At the close of the Civil War Johnson found work exhuming bodies from the temporary battlefield graves for reburial in proper cemeteries. As a result of the hard times and lack of economic opportunities associated with the aftermath of war, Johnson turned to alcohol and soon became a destitute drunkard, living on the streets of Knoxville.

Johnson recognized the futility of his life, vowed to stop drinking, and took a job first as a cook, then as a bartender. By 1879 he had saved $180, which he used to lease a building at the corner of Gay and Wall and open a saloon. Reinvesting his money in the business, Johnson soon operated three saloons: Popular Log, Popular Log Branch, and Popular Log Center Branch. His establishments, patronized by the leading men of the era, became the most popular whiskey houses in the city. Johnson operated his saloons in strict accordance with the law: he sold neither to minors, women, nor those who appeared to be intoxicated.

Horses remained Johnson's first love, however, and he acquired an enviable stable of racehorses that compared to the best in the state. He attended every major race in Tennessee and the surrounding states. In 1901 he bought the famed mare Lennette at Frankfort, Kentucky, for $6,000. He also owned George Condit, the 1893 Columbian Exposition's champion standard Bred Trotter. Johnson owned the only horse racing track in the city of Knoxville, and the track held regular races until the general assembly outlawed the sport in 1907. Today, Speedway Circle, the site of the track, maintains the original shape.

Although saloons and horses remained Johnson's principal sources of income, he also had other business interests, including vast real estate holdings. In 1906 he donated a house at the corner of Vine and Patton Streets to be used as the first black YMCA building. At the presentation ceremony on May 14, 1906, Mayor S. G. Heiskell proclaimed to the large crowd of African Americans that Johnson's gift represented the largest ever given by a black person to the YMCA.

From 1883 to 1885 Johnson served on the Knoxville board of aldermen. In 1922 Knoxville established the Cal Johnson Park in his honor, and in 1957 the Cal Johnson Recreation Center was erected in the park.

Johnson married twice but had no children. At the time of his death on April 7, 1925, his estate was estimated at $300,000-$500,000.