Smokey Row
(A Civil War story they would never tell)
Nashville, Tennessee, 1860, close to the river resided a district know as Smokey Row, consisting of a four block long, two block wide, where the industry of prostitution thrived-overall, eight full blocks of homes and houses of ill repute. Had you asked the Marshals of Nashville at the time for the federal census of these business women, they would have told you they counted over two-hundred, listed in such an occupation, but surely there were more, the unlisted list, mostly white but nearly a dozen of mulatto women were on the list, a great number were illiterate, close to two-dozen widowed. The youngest in her early teens, the oldest near sixty. Among the many, a dozen were from Kentucky, Alabama, Ireland and Canada, the rest from Tennessee. Most used, or went by common names.
On North Front Street, there was a great mansion, nearly thirty people lived in the house, among the prostitutes were several children and one black man in his early twenties, Tom Dimple. And the War Between the States began. Forth Sumter was hit, shelled. In 1863, Brigadier General R. S. Granger command in Nashville, tried to ship the vile women out of the city by steamboat, but to no avail, they all crept back into the city in even bigger numbers.
One hot evening Tom Dimple, in Nashville sat on top of the roof of this great mansion on Front Street, where he worked as a janitor, looked …