Joseph Henry Warner
Before there was Warner Park, there was 1895’s Olympia Park near the same site – 1254 McCallie Avenue - - with its race tracks, electric railway access, a theater and multiple attractions. The driving force promoting parks for Chattanooga’s expanding citizenry and budding tourists was Joseph Henry Warner, later Chattanooga’s first Commissioner of Public Utilities.
Warner, like so many Civil War veterans, first saw Chattanooga as a young soldier. Born on 5 September, 1843 near Nashville in a rural community of neighboring Sumner County, he had enlisted in Co. A, 19th Tennessee Regiment, CSA Infantry. Warner often explained that military service and love of the colonies and later the nation was ingrained in his family’s experience. His direct lineal ancestor, Augustin Warner of Virginia, had been the great-grandfather of George Washington.
While serving with his company at the Battle of Missionary Ridge in November 1863, Warner was captured and transported to Union POW Camp Rock Island, Illinois where he remained until several weeks after Generals Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston’s surrender to Union forces in 1865. He came home to Tennessee, returned to Chattanooga and became one of the city’s emerging entrepreneurs, initially focused on the hardware business. The city rewarded his efforts with success and, by 1879, Major Warner joined with a few close colleagues to form the Third National Bank, serving first as vice-president and later as president.
Three years later, he envisioned and set to work creating the Chattanooga Street Railway Company. As president, he purchased all the street railway property then existing in the city and began business with one small horse-car line. City leaders applauded his innovation and credited him as the ‘father of urban transportation’ in Tennessee’s most progressive city. While he stepped away from the city railway business for a time to pursue other business interests, when the lines neared financial collapse at the beginning of the 20th century, Warner gained control again. With renewed energy and innovative ideas about expanding lines into the newest sections of the city, Warner “perfected the system,” selling it years later to the Chattanooga Railway and Light Company.
After helping found the Third National Bank, in 1889, Warner again led a group of investors including G. M. Lee, J. I. Divine, W. T. Green and others to form the Fourth National Bank, agreeing to serve as founding president. At almost the same time, he helped create the Tennessee Slate Corporation, located in Blount County, increasing his holdings in coal, iron and natural resources. He was obviously a man who could multi-task.
Warner shied away from “practical politics,” preferring to spend his time in the “actual betterment of his community,” according to a Chattanooga Daily News story from that era. And, while he would have preferred to lead from the sidelines, he would eventually be persuaded that his adopted city needed him and he stepped forward. As his closest friend and fellow Chattanoogan Captain A. J. Gahagan, USA recalled in his eulogy at Warner’s funeral, “Major Warner possessed many rare and noble traits that were especially attractive… he was a lovely character well versed in the history of his country, a great reader… I never heard him use a word that would give offense… modest and genteel… deception had no place in his make-up.” He went on to say, “As a public-spirited citizen, he played his part well; he discharged his duties in a way that elicited approval of those he served.”
Gahagan recalled their first meeting in an emotional moment. “Major Warner and I came to Chattanooga in early 1866… he from the Confederate and I from the Union army. We soon formed a close and lasting friendship… for more than fifty years, my estimate of his high character has strengthened. Major Warner, in my opinion, has typified a gentleman more than any man who has lived or died here in the last quarter of a century.”
Dr. J. W. Bachman presided at Major Warner’s funeral “with great feeling, recalling some of the incidents that had brought them together” over the decades of service to Chattanooga. His pallbearers, who had also served alongside him as their city prospered and progressed as ‘the dynamo of the South,” were T. N. VanDyke, C. A. Noone, Filmore Gibson, Jo Anderson, James A. Cash, L. G. Walker, George McGee and George Fort Milton. Among the out-of-town family who attended the funeral were Percy Warner, Nashville, Bradden Barker, Atlanta and his sister, Mrs. B. M. Hord.
How had Warner gained his city’s admiration as a Chattanooga Commissioner and a public servant?
That’s a story for next week as we examine the history of Olympia Park?
Linda Moss Mines, Chattanooga-Hamilton County Historian, serves as Chairman of the Chattanooga Parks and Outdoors Commission.