"Charles Egbert Craddock"

Editors at the Atlantic Monthly knew their star mountain storyteller only by the signature M. N. Murfree and took her for a man. The secret broke in 1885, when Mary Murfree, her sister and her father went to Boston and astonished the editor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. She had first published in 1874-75 as R. Emmet Cembry, then became Craddock with a story set at a resort modeled on Beersheba Springs. Twenty-five books followed, though critics have long faulted her portraits of mountain people as stereotypes.

What the plaque says

"Charles Egbert Craddock" Mary Noailles Murfree, who later became a prominent authoress under this pen name, was born at "Grantlands," whose site is now marked by a large pine tree, Jan. 24, 1850. Educated at the Nashville Female Academy, later in Philadelphia, her first work was published in 1874, her last posthumously in 1930. She died in Murfreesboro, July 31, 1922.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stones River National Battlefield — 2.1 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.
• Henry Horton State Park — 25 mi
  A Duck River park on Governor Henry Horton's former farm in Marshall County, with a mill ruin from 1845, kayak floats and the grave of a governor the House declined to impeach.
• Carnton — 26 mi
  The McGavock farm in Franklin, worked by 44 enslaved people in 1860, that became the largest field hospital of the Battle of Franklin.
• Andrew Jackson's Hermitage — 27 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.

More markers nearby

• William Lytle — 0.4 mi
• Robert Smith Sanders, M. D. — 0.8 mi
• Forrest's Murfreesboro Raid, July 13, 1862 — 0.9 mi
• Hardy Murfree — 0.9 mi