KNOXVILLE — Dennis Talley keeps $4.12 in a sandwich bag in his truck’s console so he can get it under a loose paver on Gay Street before work. He manages one building on the 100 block as a side job and spends the rest of his week estimating orders at a cabinet shop. He has to remember the payment every time he parks.
In April a paver crew lifting bricks found a tin containing the 1911 ledger of Cecil Marlow’s grocery, tucked beside one of the buried storefronts left when the street was raised a story in the early 1900s. Page 38 lists customer Amos Danner’s purchases through November 9: $1.80 in flour, 96 cents in coffee, 72 cents in lard and 64 cents in lamp oil. The balance was never closed.
The margin bears initials from Mill Creek Savings in 1912, its successor Bellwood Bank in 1936, Cedar Fork Trust in 1974 and Laurel Ridge Banking in 2008, along with those of three successive owners of the building. Crew foreman Leon Vess handed Talley the open ledger and a carpenter’s pencil.
“I put mine down below that last fellow,” Talley said. “Leon was holding it while I wrote. I had a cabinet order spread over the seat and I had to move all that off so the tin could ride.”
Talley called the current bank, which holds the records of the other three. He received a photocopy of page 38 and a return envelope addressed to the department that had sent it. That department said the envelope was for corrections to the photocopy. Nobody could supply a payment address for Danner’s account.
Having signed the page, Talley now considers the account partly his, so he began leaving the balance under the paver where the ledger was found, on the first of each month. It goes in a sandwich bag from the cabinet shop’s break room with the month written on it: four dollar bills, a dime and two pennies. The first month’s bag was still there when he went back, so he put the second one on top of it. He has made six payments.
“I asked the lady if I could just drop it by her branch on my lunch,” he said. “She put me on hold to ask somebody and I ate most of my lunch sitting there. When she got back she wanted an account number. I said there isn’t one, it’s just his name in the book, and she said she’d need an account number. So I read her the name again.”