The woods before 1997
The 12 acres at the end of Luxmore Drive were never part of the neighborhood around them. In 1975 the Ohio company connected to the apartment complex below the woods passed the tract to a group that included Oliver Smith Jr. and Dr. John Montgomery Sr. and Jr., developers of West Town Mall. By 1993 Dr. John L. Montgomery Jr. owned it alone.
Knox County had zoned the land “RB,” general residential. At the time that meant apartments could be built there next to single-family homes without any public hearing. The land is steep, and its only road connection is the dead end of Luxmore Drive, with the apartment complex below on the other side.
Spring 1997: the apartment plan
In March 1997 the woods were surveyed. In April the Montgomery family formed a company, Montcarl, LLC, and moved the land into it. Then, as a homeowner later told the paper, “bulldozers showed up one weekend.”
Dr. Montgomery and Mike Carlton planned about 100 small apartments, and every car would have come and gone through Kingston Hills on Luxmore. On May 27 a paid notice in the News-Sentinel called on neighbors to pack that night's County Commission meeting.
The neighbors organize
Residents of Kingston Hills and Kingston Woods went to the Commission “en masse,” but their complaint was postponed. A committee then asked Dr. Montgomery his price for the land. He asked $640,000, and, by one account, had been offered $125,000 a year earlier. “We raised $250,000 in three days,” one of them later said. “But we couldn't negotiate the price down. So we had to find a buyer with some money.”
Joining the city
The neighbors turned to the City of Knoxville with an offer: annex our homes, and the new city property taxes will pay for the woods. A petition drew about 290 signatures in a few days. On August 11, 1997, City Council held a special meeting in a yard in the middle of Kingston Woods and voted to annex the neighborhood and buy the tract. Mayor Victor Ashe told residents the apartments would have played “havoc with your neighborhood,” and said the majority of homeowners agreeing to join the city made the purchase cost-effective.
At the final vote on August 26, residents spoke only in favor and every vote was unanimous. The plan the City adopted for the annexed area says “a greenspace area of about 16 acres will be set aside within the community.” Annexation took effect at midnight on September 26, and that day KUB began putting up the neighborhood's first street lights, starting at Ramsgate and Luxmore. Homes whose owners did not sign stayed in the county, leaving what the paper called a checkerboard; in all, 278 homes came in that fall.
The City buys the woods
On October 9, 1997 the City bought the woods from Montcarl for $523,188 through its Parks and Recreation department, and the next day began stabilizing the bulldozed ground. City officials said they planned “to restore the land to a passive green area.” The deed itself carries no park restriction.
Since then
The cleared slope has grown back into woods. The City has treated the land as a park: it rezoned it as a “City park” in 2003, listed it among its parks in 2010, and named it a Nature Conservation Park in its 2026 parks master plan. No trails or facilities have been built, and the City's one-year land-use map still shows the parcel as residential.
Some 1997 records are still being requested from the City, including a memo on the proposed “Kingston Woods Park” written the week before the final vote. The timeline below lays out every step with its source, and the documents are linked at the bottom of the page.
