Gen. Burnside made his Knoxville headquarters here at the home of Congressman & attorney John Hervey Crozier. It was no less a mansion than Longstreet’s HQ at Bleak House, the Armstrong’s Italianate villa southeast of town.

In the novel, the Crozier place was only a few blocks from the widow Ellis’s home where she heard couriers on horseback riding to Burnside on the night the Reb pickets drove in the Union ones at Fort Sanders. The Rebel Crozier and the Unionist Parson Brownlow were bitter political enemies.