University of Tennessee professors and administrators. Weston Fulton, inventor of the sylphon (used in the manufacture of thermostats), lived at 1202 Clinch in the early 1900s. William Waller Carson, founder of the school's civil engineering department, lived at 1310 Clinch, and later built what is now the Ronald McDonald House at 1705 Clinch. Thomas Jordan, the school's dean in the early 1900s, lived at 1312 White, and mathematics professor Cooper D. Schmitt lived at 1302 White. Schmitt's son, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bernadotte Everly Schmitt, lived in the house as a child. Artist Catherine Wiley lived at 1317 White in the 1910s while working as an instructor at UT. With the advent of the automobile in the 1920s, Knoxville's wealthier residents began to move to suburbs on the periphery of the city, and urban neighborhoods such as Fort Sanders began to decline. After World War II, the University of Tennessee's student body grew from just over 2,000 to almost 30,000 by 1975, and most of the homes in Fort Sanders were converted into student housing. The university's expansion (and more recently the expansion of Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center) led to the destruction of many of the neighborhood's early houses, and preservationists, namely the Fort Sanders Community Improvement Association, increased efforts to protect its historical resources. A Death in the Family Author James Agee (1909–1955) spent his early childhood in the Fort Sanders neighborhood. The Agees initially lived at 1505 Highland Avenue (the house is no longer standing), but moved to Laurel Avenue after the death of Agee's father in 1915. Agee's maternal grandparents, Joel and Emma Tyler, lived on Clinch Avenue. Joel Tyler was a cofounder of the mill machinery company Ty-Sa-Man, where Agee's father worked. The Fort Sanders neighborhood provides the primary setting for Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family. The novel opens with Agee and his father taking a walk through downtown Knoxville, making stops on Gay Street and Market Square, and passing the Deaf and Dumb Asylum and the L&N Station as they made their way back to Fort Sanders. Agee mentioned a vacant lot along Forest Avenue where he and his father liked to look out on the lights of North Knoxville in the distance, and listen to the engines of the L&N, which "coughed and browsed" in the valley below. The book ends with Agee and his uncle conversing while standing over