The Mabry-Hazen House Museum, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is located on five acres atop Mabry Hill and includes the four-acre Civil War Bethel Cemetery. This stately, elegant home of the Victorian and Civil War periods showcases one of the largest collections in America containing original artifacts including china, silver, crystal, and antique furnishings. Built in 1858 and housing three generations of the same family from 1865-1987, the Mabry-Hazen House served as headquarters for both Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War. Joseph A. Mabry II outfitted a company of Confederate soldiers at a personal cost of $100,000 and received the honorary title of "General." Alternately occupied by Union and Confederate forces, it was Confederate Gen. Zollicoffer's headquarters in 1861, and during the Union occupation the grounds were fortified. The Bethel Cemetery contains more than 1,600 Confederate dead, including approximately 109 from the battle of Fort Sanders on November 29, 1863, and nearly fifty Union dead. The colorful family appears in several literary works. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain described a gunfight with a local banker that killed the home's builder, Gen. Mabry and his son, Joseph III, on Knoxville's Gay Street. Gen. Mabry's son-in-law, Rush Hazen, was the benefactor of Leonora Whitaker Wood, whose story was told as fiction in the novel Christy. Gen. Mabry's granddaughter, socialite Evelyn Hazen, was the subject of a book about her sensational lawsuit against her fiance.
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