Perez Dickinson spent two years at Amherst College before coming to Knoxville where his brother-in-law, Joseph Estabrook, was principal of the Knoxville Female Academy. Dickinson taught at Hampton Sidney and then attended UT (as East Tennessee College) and was awarded an honorary AB degree in 1832. He bought a lot on Main Street (razed for the parking lot next to First Baptist Church following World War II) and built for himself and his mother a mansion with wide and spacious rooms, broad porches, and cellars.
Dickinson was an abolitionist, and he and Thomas Humes, who served as editor, briefly printed a biweekly newspaper, the Knoxville Times, in which his antislavery views were set forth. He created a secret tunnel connecting one of his cellars with a cave extending almost to the water’s edge. A small servants’ house covered the exit of the passageway. From this point the current would carry a small skiff to within a few yards of a cavern at the waterline of Cherokee Bluffs, where those making the journey on the underground railway would wait for the next leg of their journey to begin.
He took his family out of Knoxville in 1861 when all East Tennesseans were required to sign an oath of allegiance to the confederacy. He returned to Knoxville in 1863 when union soldiers held the city. After the war he renovated the Main Street house, which had been commandeered by the confederates as officers’ quarters and used by union forces as a hospital. He left the tunnel.
Dickinson became president of the First National Bank, in addition to being a wealthy wholesale merchant in the firm of Cowan-McClung. In 1865, when African American Shiloh Presbyterian Church was established, the members met on the rear porch and the lawn of the Main Street residence until a lot was bought and a sanctuary built.
In 1869 he purchased a large, level island in the river just above the city (since 1930, Island Home Airport) and built a large country home overlooking it, which he called Island Home. He established a model farm (including breeding a one-thousand-pound hog) on the grounds of what is now the Tennessee School for the Deaf—the superintendent’s home is the house that Dickinson built.
The friendship formed with Thomas Humes while a student at East Tennessee College and association with Humes in the publication of the Knoxville Times resulted in Dickinson’s appointment to the UT Board of Trustees. In 1879 he was also appointed by Governor Arthur Marks as a member of the first Board of Visitors of the newly renamed University of Tennessee, a board established in connection with the name change. He offered gold medals for superior scholarship to UT students for many years. In 1899, at the dedication of Estabrook Hall, he presented UT with a portrait of Joseph Estabrook painted by Lloyd Branson.