Free Hill(s) Community

Accounts record that in 1878 Black residents were violently driven out of Free Hill and neighboring Celina, after earlier attacks on the community. At its peak about 300 people lived here, with two churches, a school, two groceries and three clubs. Its Rosenwald school, used from about 1925 to 1949, is one of roughly thirty still standing and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. Robert Bud Garrett made flint marbles here for rolley hole, and Calvin Hamilton was a well-remembered riverman. Today about seventy people live in Free Hill.

What the plaque says

Free Hill(s) Community Free Hill(s), a historic Black community, was established northeast of Celina before the Civil War by former slaves of Virginia Hill. Hill brought her slaves from North Carolina to then Overton County, purchased 2,000 hilly and rough acres, settled and freed them. The freed Blacks took the surname Hill, thus the name Free Hill(s). After 1865, other Clay County Blacks also settled in the area.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Standing Stone State Park — 6.0 mi
  A New Deal park on Mill Creek named for a vanished stone that Native peoples revered and railroad builders blasted, with a lake, 1930s cabins and a marbles championship.
• Cordell Hull Birthplace and Museum State Park — 16 mi
  A replica of the log cabin where the secretary of state and Nobel laureate was born in 1871, with a museum of his belongings, in Pickett County's hills.
• Cummins Falls State Park — 21 mi
  A 75-foot waterfall and swimming hole on the Blackburn Fork, saved from a housing development in 2011 and opened as Tennessee's 54th state park.
• Red Boiling Springs — 21 mi
  A Macon County spa town built around red sulphur springs, with five kinds of mineral water, red-painted pumps and the surviving hotels of a resort that once held more than a dozen.

More markers nearby

• Butler's Landing / Bailey Butler — 6.0 mi
• Abraham Hananiah — 8.1 mi
• Fisk Female Academy — 9.6 mi
• Livingston Academy — 14 mi