Culleoka Institute

Culleoka's school became one of the best-known boarding schools in the South after it left town. William Sawney Webb ran the school from 1870, and his brother John joined him in 1873, the year Vanderbilt was founded; the school's oldest and best boys could then enroll there. Webb moved to Bell Buckle in 1886 after Culleoka incorporated and legalized the sale of alcohol. The Webb School there is called the oldest continuously operating boarding school in the South. It admitted girls as boarders in 1973, though local girls had attended as day students earlier.

What the plaque says

Culleoka Institute The Culleoka Institute began in the basement of the Methodist church in 1869. William R. ("Old Swaney") Webb assumed management of the school in 1870, laying the foundation for what became Webb School. In 1876 a large school building was erected to the northwest of this location. Webb moved the school to the town of Bell Buckle, Tennessee, in 1886, following disputes with locals concerning the sale of liquor to students. The school still operates in Bell Buckle today.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Mink Slide and East 8th Street — 9.5 mi
  Columbia's Black business and church district south of the courthouse square, where on the night of February 25, 1946 a white mob gathered and Black veterans stood guard.
• James K. Polk Home and Museum — 9.7 mi
  The 1816 brick house in Columbia where Polk practiced law and campaigned for the legislature, now a museum that also tells of the people the Polk family enslaved.
• Henry Horton State Park — 18 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.
• Pulaski Public Square and the Giles County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The 1909 courthouse and nineteenth-century storefronts on Pulaski's square, in the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded and where the architect Moses McKissack III was born.

More markers nearby

• Thomas Hart Benton — 5.8 mi
• Joseph Brown — 7.1 mi
• Side by Side — 8.9 mi
• Colonel Sidney Post and General John Bell Hood at Loftin Hill — 9.0 mi