Emory Road

Getting west on it was slow going. North Carolina's 300 soldiers, each paid with 800 acres for a year's work, helped clear a trail about ten feet wide, and 25 families took it the first year. For years only riders and pack horses could manage it, and travelers gathered at the Clinch River to wait for a militia escort. Even after a lottery paid for widening, wagons of the late 1790s sank to their axles, and on Spencer's Mountain drivers set every brake and dragged a tree behind. Andrew Jackson, Francis Asbury and Andre Michaux all rode it.

What the plaque says

Emory Road Built from here southwest to the Clinch River, about 1788, many early settlements and institutions were established along its route. Haley's Station, a pioneer fort, was 3 miles E., on Richland Creek. The Mouth-of-Richland Baptist church was established here, 1788.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 16 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Blount Mansion — 18 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Museum of Appalachia — 20 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.
• Norris Dam and Norris Dam State Park — 22 mi
  TVA's first dam, finished in 1936 on the Clinch River, and the state park beside it with the 1798 Rice Grist Mill, built for a valley whose families were moved out.

More markers nearby

• Blaine's Crossroads — 0.3 mi
• Janeway Cabin — 0.3 mi
• Albert Miller Lea — 1.7 mi
• Nicholas Gibbs Homestead — 8.0 mi