Market Square is a historic district and pedestrian mall located in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, United States.

[2] A local newspaper once dubbed Market Square, "the most democratic place on earth," where "the rich and the poor, the white and the black, jostle each other in perfect equality.

"[6] The Square has been mentioned in the works of James Agee, Cormac McCarthy, David Madden, Ken Mink and Richard Yancey,[5]: 113–122  and has hosted performers ranging from Duke Ellington to Steve Winwood.

[5]: 52–60  Politicians and activists who have delivered speeches at the Square include Frances Willard, Booker T. Washington, William Jennings Bryan, Edward Ward Carmack, and Ronald Reagan.

[2] Market Square is one of only two locations in Knoxville where the street addresses still follow the city's pre-1890 numbering format, the other being Emory Place north of downtown.

In 1853, William G. Swan and Joseph A. Mabry, who had been speculating in land around Knoxville, purchased an 11-acre (4.5 ha) tract of pastureland from physician John Fouche that lay north of Union Avenue.

"[5]: 16–22 By 1861, Market Square had become significant enough to be a designated polling station for the Ordinance of Secession vote that took place on June 8 of that year.

Much of the stall furniture was tossed outside and ruined by the elements, and the Square's shopkeepers continuously voiced their fears about the large amounts of volatile gunpowder being stored in the Market House.

The following year, the Market House was expanded northward by about 90 feet (27 m), leaving just a short gap between it and City Hall that acted as a weighing station.

During the same period, German immigrant and Confederate veteran Peter Kern opened his "ice cream saloon" at the southwest corner of the Square.

Within a few years, Fenton's Monumental Marble Works was operating out of a shop on the Square, carving sculptures such as those found at Old Gray Cemetery.

[5]: 52, 73  Saloons, such as Michael Cullinan's, the Jersey Lily, and Houser & Mournan's, maintained a continued presence, although the Women's Christian Temperance Union was active on the Square by the 1880s.

During the same period, Greek immigrant John Demetrius Cavalaris opened the Golden Sun, beginning a multi-generational presence on the Square.

"[5]: 52–60  Promoter Frank Murphy held fiddle contests in Market Hall in the 1920s which drew the likes of Charlie Bowman, Earl Johnson, and the Tennessee Ramblers,[12] and during same decade the St. James Hotel (at the northeast end of the Square) hosted the studios of WNOX.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1957 novel, A Death in the Family, James Agee recalled going into a noisy Market Square bar with his father while they walked through downtown Knoxville in 1915.

[14] Cormac McCarthy gives vivid descriptions of Market Square in both his 1965 novel, The Orchard Keeper, and his 1979 novel, Suttree, both of which are set in Knoxville and its vicinity.

More recently, the Square figures in Richard Marius's An Affair of Honor (2001), Ken Mink's "Knoxville: A City Born in Blood and Flames," featuring Civil War era action involving the city's richest family, the Armstrongs, and the use of their homes as military headquarters and later as a hospital for wounded soldiers, and Richard Yancey's The Highly Effective Detective (2006).

[5]: 113–120 Political groups have been active at Market Square since at least 1876, when politician William F. Yardley spoke before a gathering of Radical Republicans.