Castle Heights Military Academy

Cadets here ate to a publisher's orders. Bernarr Macfadden, the fitness advocate who bought the struggling school in 1928, required daily salads, banned condiments and pillows, and had the academy start a dairy to supply the milk the boys were told to drink. Heights and weights went on monthly report cards. Duane and Gregg Allman attended before the Allman Brothers Band. The school closed in 1986, and the National Register campus now houses Lebanon's city hall and its history museum alongside other businesses.

What the plaque says

Castle Heights Military Academy Castle Heights School was founded in 1902 by David E. Mitchell and I.W.P. Buchanan. Early headmasters were Buchanan, L.L. Rice, and O.N. Smith. In 1914 the school became a military academy. Acquired by the McFadden Foundation in 1928, it has been a ROTC unit and an honor military school ever since.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wynnewood State Historic Site — 13 mi
  A National Historic Landmark log inn at the Bledsoe's Lick springs, beside a Mississippian mound center and tied to the domestic slave trade.
• Andrew Jackson's Hermitage — 17 mi
  Andrew Jackson's cotton plantation east of Nashville, where visitors can walk to the quarters, Alfred's Cabin and the Enslaved Cemetery as well as the mansion.
• Stones River National Battlefield — 24 mi
  The Murfreesboro battlefield of December 1862, with a national cemetery built by Black soldiers, a Trail of Tears route and the story of the freedmen's settlement called Cemetery.
• Red Boiling Springs — 34 mi
  A Macon County spa town built around red sulphur springs, with five kinds of mineral water, red-painted pumps and the surviving hotels of a resort that once held more than a dozen.

More markers nearby

• Judge Nathan Green, Sr. — steps away
• Cumberland University — 0.6 mi
• Caruthers Hall — 0.7 mi
• Robert Looney Caruthers — 0.7 mi