First Presbyterian Church

For its first seventeen years under Samuel Carrick the congregation had no building and met under trees, in the territorial barracks and in the first courthouse. The Brick Meeting House went up between 1812 and 1816, and a second church replaced it in 1853. In the war Confederate soldiers kept horses in the graveyard, and after the siege Federal troops used the building as a hospital, barracks and a Freedmen's Bureau school. The congregation took it back in 1866. Over the chancel the Hebrew words Jehovah Jireh remain.

What the plaque says

First Presbyterian Church Founded in 1792, with James White, John Adair and George McNutt founding elders. White, who gave the ground for the Church, is buried here, as are Samuel Carrick, first pastor and president of Blount College, now the university of Tennessee, William Blount, Governor of the southwest Territory, and many other prominent pioneers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — 0.2 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.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 1.2 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 16 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• White's Mill — steps away
• Staub's Theatre — steps away
• Market Square — steps away
• Old Knox County Courthouse — 0.2 mi