Boyhood Home of Ray H. Jenkins

Jenkins was born in North Carolina in 1897 and grew up in Rural Vale and the logging town of Tellico Plains. At nineteen he volunteered with the Tennessee militia to fight Pancho Villa. He graduated cum laude from the University of Tennessee law school in 1920 and, as a young Knoxville lawyer, took court appointments for defendants who could not pay. During the Army-McCarthy hearings he worked alongside minority counsel Robert Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Time, and was the model for Cragnose, a character in Al Capp's Li'l Abner.

What the plaque says

Boyhood Home of Ray H. Jenkins Known as the "Terror of Tellico Plains," this eminent Knoxville lawyer gained national fame as Chief Counsel at the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. He defended more than 600 persons on trial for their lives and never lost a one to the electric chair.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sequoyah Birthplace Museum — 15 mi
  The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' museum on Tellico Lake, near the town where Sequoyah was born, telling how he built the Cherokee syllabary and what the Tellico Dam drowned.
• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 16 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.
• Ocoee Whitewater Center — 23 mi
  The Forest Service site on the Ocoee River in Cherokee National Forest that hosted the 1996 Olympic canoe slalom, on a river that TVA dams and releases by schedule.

More markers nearby

• Fort Loudoun Massacre — steps away
• Early Gold Mining — 7.5 mi
• Tellico Blockhouse — 9.9 mi
• Estes Kefauver — 11 mi