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By Root 363 0

population in Memphis from 3,000 to over 15,000, nearly 40 percent of the city’s total makeup. Blacks constituted only one faction of a largely disparate and unhappy population. Irish and German immigrants struggled to free themselves from the mire of postwar poverty and racial politics. Yanks continued to live in the South to facilitate reconstruction. And the upper echelons, white aristocrats of a bygone era, were depressed by a river town less southern and far more western, full of filth, violence and rough river folk. City legislators spent money extravagantly and foolishly. Indifference from the upper classes broadened the divide, and the by-product of such disregard was filth. In all, it created an atmosphere of dissatisfaction in every sphere of Memphis life, and the resulting discontent became an anchor heaving against the city’s progress. By the 1870s, Memphis was still very much a city balanced on the edge of the Mississippi River and its future, both a coarse river town and an extension of the dying South.

General Colton Greene had an idea. With an isosceles nose and a walrus moustache, Greene had a profile like Joseph Stalin. He was a lifelong bachelor, president of the State Savings Bank, owner of an insurance company, future founder of the Tennessee Club, a man who liked to make things happen. He had traveled the world and even held a permit for admittance to private rooms of the Vatican. Greene arrived in Memphis, emerging from the war a hero with a little-known past and a hazy air of nobility. He had been on the frontlines of every battle and wounded three different times; Colton Greene liked to face a challenge head-on.

Greene enlisted the help of Memphis’s most influential business and political leaders. This was, after all, the decade in which anything could happen. Thomas Edison had established his Electric Light Company. Johns Hopkins University, the first European-style medical institute, had opened. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. George Eastman was developing the first Kodak camera. Great men were doing great things.

Greene and others like him believed Memphis, for all its flaws, had a very bright future. Already four train lines rumbled through the city, and like the birthmark for any progressive place, the skyline ballooned with smoke from steam-powered mills. Cotton presses bellowed all hours of the day and night. Over fifteen hundred buildings were under construction, and mule cars screeched along metal tracks. The new Peabody Hotel, where whole plantations had been won or lost over a hand of cards, boasted a chef all the way from swanky Saratoga Springs in the Northeast. The grand duke of Russia had made a recent visit to the city on the bluffs. Even the former president of the Confederacy had chosen to make Memphis his home. And people strolling down Main Street literally walked among the crates of cotton, strands of the white gold catching on their clothes and hanging like a talisman. All Memphis needed was a push in the right direction to take its place among cities like St. Louis and Chicago.

There was another reason to attract some positive, national attention to Memphis: disease. Over the last decade, Memphis had earned a reputation as a medical town, in part because the north had used it as a hospital center during the war, but mostly because epidemics had recently rained upon the city. Two yellow fever epidemics, cholera and malaria had given Memphis a reputation as a sickly city and a filthy one. It was unheard of for a city with a population as large as the one in Memphis to have no waterworks—the city still relied entirely on the river and rain cisterns to collect water, and there was no way to remove sewage. While the bluffs afforded a high, beautiful vista of the river, they also sloped back into the heart of the city. Rain streamed down the backside of the bluffs into the town, and further still, into the Gayoso Bayou, which wrapped from the Wolf River in a series of stagnant pools through the entire city, north to south. With every downpour, downtown privies