History Happy Hour: Presented by Knoxville History Project

For May’s rendition of the Knoxville History Project, historian Jack Neely will host young UT scholar Olivia Roberts, who will be talking about Knoxville’s little-known asylum cemetery. Eastern State, once known as “Lyons View Asylum,” was founded in the 1880s as Tennessee’s second public mental hospital – which included an almost self-sustaining farming campus that was larger than UT’s at the time. Hundreds of Eastern State patients rest in what is now the location of Lakeshore Park. Roberts regards her project as a “memorialization” to remember these people buried near where they spent their later years, some of them forgotten by their own families.