The Surrounding Area
MCCARTY STREET
When the town was first founded in 1824, McCarty Street was at the northern edge of downtown. Businesses, government buildings, and churches existed along McCarty on the west side of Monroe Street. East of Monroe, a residential neighborhood developed. This was the neighborhood of the Hagner/Knott House. McCarty became Park Avenue around 1905. In the time of segregation, only white people would have lived in this neighborhood. After Emancipation in 1865, freed Black people settled in Frenchtown, a community located northwest of the house. By the late 1800s, Smokey Hollow, another Black neighborhood, had formed. Smokey Hollow extended across the present-day Apalachee Parkway and Cascades Park area, blocks from the Hagner/Knott House. It was demolished in the 1960s to construct government buildings, add parking lots, and widen Apalachee Parkway.
Smokey Hollow, 1947
The neighborhood is in the foreground of this image.
Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida
By the mid-1880s, a few structures stood on the west side of the Hagner/Knott House nearer to Monroe Street. Over the next two decades, the buildings housed different businesses. A building at the corner of McCarty and Monroe Streets offered a small subscription library for white patrons on the second floor. Former Florida governor David S. Walker started the library. By 1903, a telephone office had taken the place of the building containing the library, and the new David S. Walker Library replaced another structure. On the east side of the Hagner/Knott House, the lot directly next to the home remained vacant, though two houses, built in the 1830s–40s, stood farther down the same block. Additional dwellings across McCarty Street faced the houses.
In the first decade of the 1900s, the neighborhood remained residential, with houses running east along the newly-renamed Park Avenue. By 1909, a house had been built on the vacant space next to the soon-to-be-named Knott House. At the end of the block was the Chittenden House.
Neighborhood around the Hagner/Knott House, 1888
The future Knott House is to the far right in this photo (circled in red).
Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida
<Back Home Next>
