For the Union

Oliver Perry Temple, born near Greeneville in 1820, was one of the organizers of East Tennessee's Unionists. A young lawyer who had come within about 400 votes of unseating Andrew Johnson for Congress in 1847, he drafted the final resolutions of the June 1861 East Tennessee Convention and later defended Unionists charged with treason. In wartime he helped organize relief for loyal families. Governor Brownlow made him a chancellor in 1866. He served as a university trustee for more than fifty years, and his East Tennessee and the Civil War (1899) told the story from the Unionist side.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 1.1 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.
• Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary — 17 mi
  The coal-mining prison opened in 1896 after the Coal Creek War ended convict leasing, where James Earl Ray escaped in 1977, now a tourist site and distillery.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 18 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.
• Frozen Head State Park — 18 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.

More markers nearby

• Capitol for a Day — steps away
• Southwest Point — 0.4 mi
• Honoring the Kingston Coal Ash Cleanup Workers — 3.1 mi
• Harriman: Utopia of Temperance — 4.7 mi