John Shearer: Getting To Visit Former Joe Engel Home Off Highway 58

To use baseball vernacular, Deana and Will Hixson unexpectedly found their own field of dreams in a stone cottage home with about six acres of grassy and tree-dotted land surrounding it.

That is because they learned in a somewhat belated manner when purchasing their home in early 2020 that it had once been the residence of noted former Chattanooga Lookouts owner Joe Engel. As a result, their thoughts ended up focusing not just on home updating, but also excitedly on the world of home runs and home plate, with a sudden interest in researching Mr. Engel’s story.

“We found out it had been Joe Engel's home either just before we made the offer to purchase it, or immediately after we made the offer,” recalled Ms. Hixson, who kindly gave a tour of their home at 6003 Clark Road off Highway 58 recently. “But it was not advertised as Joe Engel's former home.”

While many longtime Chattanoogans are aware that Mr. Engel and his wife, Hallie, also later lived on some farm acreage off Julian Road in East Brainerd, where the Council Fire golf course and other developments have been constructed in recent years, this was his first main home.

He lived there from not long after arriving in Chattanooga to head up the Lookouts operation before the 1930 season until moving out to East Brainerd at about the end of World War II. The latter home became his base until his death in 1969.

I thought it might be fun hopefully over the next few months with baseball season approaching to share some various historically related anecdotes about Joe Engel and the Lookouts, including with this first story. That is in part since the fate of Engel Stadium that he built is now in the hands of owner UTC, and questions remain regarding how much of it will remain as the school expands some of its sports facilities in the future.

I had first heard from Ms. Hixson when she emailed me wondering if I knew of any historical photos of the home, although they had one they found at a local funeral home. She later invited me to come out and see this large piece of Chattanooga baseball memorabilia.

Covered in part by stone and featuring a stone entrance gate and a stone pavilion-like structure surrounding a now-covered well, the home almost has the feel of an outdoors lodge. That is in part due to a giant fireplace in the paneled large den. “Most people say it is the biggest one they have seen in a home,” she said as she pointed out the fireplace, adding that the previous owners had used wood logs but that they converted it to gas while saving the large fireplace screen and poker.

Just like some baseball players, this home actually changed positions over the years. The HIxsons say it was originally smaller and in a different location. For someone standing by the side of the house facing Clark Road and looking toward the street, it sat about 600 feet to the right in a 45-degree direction, they said.

The move was due to necessity, as TVA began its work flooding the area in the late 1930s. Mr. Engel had bought the land in 1931 from Lon Clark Jr., who was likely part of the family for whom the street is named. He apparently liked its proximity to the Lake Waconda that was there and the Rod and Gun Club. He enjoyed the outdoors and even had some racing pigeons.

The Chattanooga Yacht Club that morphed out of the Rod and Gun Club is located just across a small side channel of Lake Chickamauga from the old Engel estate.

TVA had bought his former land in 1937, and he bought some adjacent land to move the home to about 1938.

The Hixsons say that Mr. Engel added on to the home immediately after it was moved and lived with his wife in the Hotel Patten for a period.

Subsequent owners also made at least one addition. The Hixsons believe they are the sixth family to own the home.

Ms. Hixson said their updates involved mostly putting in a new HVAC system and adding new windows – while storing as souvenirs a few of the old wood-framed ones in the basement next to a couple of old sinks.

Other reminders of the old home dating back to Joe Engel’s days include a fan in the attic that a worker told them was the largest he had ever seen, some old ventilation grates (including ones still used on the first floor), old solid wooden doors with brass door knobs, a nice staircase, a call button, and a secret door upstairs that looks like a bookcase.

Behind the latter she found an old holiday card to Joe Engel from George Trautman of the American Association of Professional Baseball Clubs. She also found an old Joe Engel business receipt in another place, and she realized someone wrote “Joe Engel job” on some boards on the underside of their stairway leading down to the basement.

That has all added to the fun of living there, Ms. Hixson said. “I wish I knew more about it. We love this old house,” she added.

That has come after they have spent not only some time at the local home remodeling stores as new owners do, but also at the library, at least in the form of finding old newspaper articles online and in TVA documents.

Ms. Hixson said this research did unveil some interesting aspects about Mr. Engel while he lived at the home. That included a letter of reprimand from TVA to Mr. Engel over a fence he put up and some controversy over using city of Chattanooga employees to haul some old stone for the home construction from the Scholze Tannery site off South Broad Street.

Mr. Engel felt he was doing nothing wrong and paid the workers, but questions about city workers doing private work resulted in the loss of one city official’s job, Ms. Hixson said.

Outside the home among some older trees sporadically spaced is a stone and rock object that looks like an odd-shaped table, and the Hixsons are not sure what it is. And by Clark Road is what remains of an old rock storage building likely used for dogs and pigeons and as a barbecue pit. Inscribed in some concrete there are the names of Joe and Hallie Engel and former major league player Kiki Cuyler, who managed the Lookouts in 1939.

They think the building was added on to over the years, just like the home was.

Ms. Hixson said that the building had been overtaken with vegetation when they bought the property, and that they cleaned it up and saved as much as they could. While they were doing the work, people passing by on the street would stop by and hope they were not tearing the building down, they said. Today, it looks almost like a medieval ruin in an eye-catching sort of way.

It is an obvious sign that some history has taken place on the grounds, as do the large boxwoods outside the home.

And plenty of history did take place in Chattanooga related to the former homeowner. Arriving to head the Lookouts before the 1930 season under the ownership of the Washington Senators and Clark Griffith, Mr. Engel had a resume of accomplishments in the promotional and business world that could fill a book as easily as a baseball hall of famer’s stats on the field could.

Born on March 12, 1893, as the second of six children of Washington, D.C., hotel proprietor William Engel, he grew up playing on the White House lawn with several presidential children, including those of Teddy Roosevelt. He was a multi-sport athlete at Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland and eventually became a professional baseball pitcher with such teams as Washington, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. His roommate with Washington was the great Walter Johnson.

He later became a scout for the Senators before coming to Chattanooga, but he was also as multi-faceted in his careers as a utility player or switch hitter is in baseball. He was also in vaudeville in the late 1920s. At one show in Chicago, he was on the same bill as noted future singer and actor Bing Crosby. Bob Hope, Jack Dempsey and Arthur Godfrey were other acquaintances he had over the years along with all the baseball ones.

Mr. Engel, who was described as jovial and genial, had also run a couple of steamboats on the Mississippi River. This was apparently in connection with his marriage to his first wife, Mary Polhamus, whose father had a grain operation and Mr. Engel carried some grain on his boats.

They had one son, Bryant, but he tragically died in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 17, 1930, after an apparent drunk driver struck him while he was walking. This was not long after his father had come to Chattanooga. Bryant was only 9 years old, and the incident occurred on the same day a divorce court settlement had been decided between Mr. Engel and his first wife.

Although how much the tragedy affected Mr. Engel seems lost to history, he did later find marital bliss. He met Hallie Birckhead, who was about six years his junior, at a Washington party in 1932 apparently during his baseball-related travels. They were married on April 17, 1934, at a Riverview home on Sunset Road, with the Rev. James Fowle of First Presbyterian Church officiating.

As a result, Mr. Engel no longer had to live at the Harrison home as a bachelor.

Among the other memorable Lookouts-related events that took place while he was at the Clark Road home, or at least in the process of moving there, was the promotion when he used his old vaudeville tricks to sign 17-year-old girl pitcher Jackie Mitchell for a game in 1931.

She struck out both stars Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who were likely quite accommodating to the promotion, during a Yankees exhibition before the season started.

Perhaps the most famous Joe Engel promotion occurred while he and his wife lived at the home before it was moved up the hill and enlarged. Although he did not originate the idea as such, on April 1, 1936, a newly constructed home at 1 Rivermont Road by the S curves of Hixson Pike was given away.

Everett Allen of the then-fledgling Chattanooga Free Press had an option on the lot, and he talked various builders and contractors into donating materials and labor as part of the promotion. As a result, more than 24,000 people packed in and around Engel Stadium for the ticket giveaway for the free home. You had to have a drawing ticket and be present to win, and Charlie Mills was announced as the winner in the fifth inning.

No telling how Mr. and Mrs. Engel talked about that memorable night after they got back to their Clark Road home.

As a sidenote, I once wrote a detailed story about that event and remember I used the line that people came not to see a home run, but a home won. And I recall looking in both the Chattanooga Times and Chattanooga News from that date on microfilm and finding only scant references to the giveaway.

I was confused, but then I looked in the smaller Chattanooga Free Press, the sponsoring paper, and there I found pages of detailed information about the giveaway.

As could be said with the Clark Road home that was later moved and enlarged, Mr. Engel was laying the foundation for his long association with the Chattanooga Lookouts and the larger community during his stay there until the mid-1940s.

The residence was later taken over by his fellow outdoors-loving close friend, Dr. Fritz Ebert, who lived there until his death in 1970. Mr. Engel had taken his home at 1816 Crestwood Drive in a swap but apparently did not live there long or at all, according to some old city directories.

Dr. Ebert was involved with the development of the Medical Arts Building on McCallie Avenue and had his office there.

Mr. and Mrs. Hixson – who grew up going to school just across the Georgia line at the old Rossville High and Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High, respectively -- have learned to appreciate all this local history even more from living in Mr. Engel’s former home.

“It gives me a sense of history and how things changed,” said Mr. Hixson, who remembers going to one old Lookouts game at Engel Stadium in the old days. “This home was out in the country when it was built. It is interesting to see how things changed around the lake. It is Chattanooga history.”

And for Ms. Hixson, the historical journey has apparently just begun. “It’s got me more interested in learning about Joe Engel and the Lookouts,” she said of this man whose home was made of stone but whose work was on a diamond.

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net