Andre Michaux

Michaux's Tennessee wildflower notes were a sideline to a larger ambition. Louis XVI appointed him royal botanist in 1785, and he set up a 111-acre garden near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1787, shipping ninety cases of plants and seeds to France. In 1793 Thomas Jefferson gathered thirty signatures to fund an exploration from the Mississippi up the Missouri to the Pacific a decade before Lewis and Clark, but it never took place. He died in Madagascar in 1802, and his Flora Boreali-Americana appeared in 1803.

What the plaque says

Andre Michaux (Side one) From 1785 to 1796, French botanist Andre Michaux, the foremost European botanist of his day, traveled throughout eastern North America. On assignment from the French monarchy, Michaux studied and collected North American plants, roots, and seeds for shipment to France. His travels brought him to present-day Tennessee in 1789, 1793, 1795, and 1796. (Side two) In May 1795 and March 1796, Michaux stayed at the home of Col. John Tipton. During the visit, he made notes about the spring wildflowers he found blooming in abundance. On March 21, 1796, he remarked that the mountains were covered in several places with bloodroot, spring beauty, and trout lily.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 5.5 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 7.6 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 7.7 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 9.5 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.

More markers nearby

• Tipton-Haynes Historic Site — steps away
• Tipton-Haynes Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• East Tennessee & Western North Carolina (ET & WNC) Depot — 1.8 mi
• Johnson City Sessions — 1.8 mi