Knoxville Street Department

About Knoxville Street Department

Knoxville wakes up in winter to the low grind of trucks working the grid of streets around the Marion County courthouse square, long before most porches have a light on. The Knoxville Street Department keeps that grid open — the routes past downtown storefronts, the roads out toward the sprint car track that sits silent and snow-covered all winter, the streets that dead-end near Lake Red Rock where the water goes gray and still under the cold. It's a town shaped by the raceway's roar every summer and by a much slower rhythm the rest of the year, and nowhere is that contrast more obvious than on a February morning with fresh snow squeaking under tires on a freshly cleared street. The plows run block by block, salt trucks trailing behind, so that the route to the elementary school and the route out to the highway are both open by first light. It's unglamorous work, done street by street, so the rest of Knoxville can get where it's going.