Fork of the River

Mecklenburg, the Ramsey estate at the meeting of the French Broad and Holston, held a mansion, a ferry across the Holston and a 4,000-volume library of early Tennessee documents that J. G. M. Ramsey used for his Annals of Tennessee. A Union soldier burned the house when the family fled in 1863. The same confluence had drawn Presbyterians earlier: in 1790 the minister Samuel Carrick helped found Lebanon-in-the-Fork church there, and Ramsey lies buried in its cemetery near his father.

What the plaque says

Fork of the River Five miles south, Devereaux Gilliam founded a station where the French Broad and Holston Rivers meet, on an aboriginal mound, site of a Cherokee hunting camp. The store house build by Col. Francis A. Ramsey in 1797 still stands nearby. Mecklenburg where his son, Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey, wrote the Annals of Tennessee, was also here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 3.0 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 — 3.8 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.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 19 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 — 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.

More markers nearby

• Ramsey House — 1.2 mi
• Island Home — 1.7 mi
• Colored (Negro) Department: Tennessee School for the Deaf (TSD) — 2.3 mi
• First African American Church — 2.8 mi