Cowan Railroad Museum

Cowan stood at the foot of the climb to the Cumberland Plateau, and the grade decided its trade. Several branch lines met the Nashville to Chattanooga main line of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway here, and the main line ran through the Cowan Tunnel just beyond. As the last stop before the uphill haul, the town based pusher engines to help trains up the mountain. The road to Sewanee and Monteagle gains nearly a thousand feet. The town's economy declined with the railroad once U.S. 41A was built in the 1940s.

What the plaque says

Cowan Railroad Museum Built in 1904, the Cowan Railroad Depot handled travelers bound for Nashville and Chattanooga, as well as Sewanee and the Cumberland Plateau, until it closed in 1971. In 1976 the depot was moved from Tennessee Avenue to its present location, now housing the Cowan Railroad Museum.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 5.8 mi
  The Episcopal university on the Cumberland Plateau, founded in 1857 as a school for the slaveholding South and now examining that history through its own Roberson Project.
• Tims Ford State Park — 14 mi
  A lake park on the Elk River below the Cumberland Plateau, made by a 1970 TVA dam on land the Cherokee and Chickasaw ceded by treaty in the early 1800s.
• Jack Daniel Distillery — 22 mi
  The oldest registered distillery in the United States, in a limestone hollow outside Lynchburg, where the tour now names Nathan Nearest Green, an enslaved man, as the first master distiller.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 23 mi
  A 2,000-year-old enclosure of piled stone and earth on the bluffs above the forks of the Duck River, built by Native people between about 80 and 550 A.D., with a museum and waterfall trails.

More markers nearby

• Peter Turney — 4.1 mi
• The Blind Knight — 5.4 mi
• Desegregation of Franklin County Public Schools — 5.6 mi
• Saint's Rest — 5.7 mi