Gabriel McKissack

The McKissack story begins with an enslaved man. According to the firm's history, Moses McKissack was taken from West Africa, sold to a North Carolina contractor and trained to make bricks; once freed, he sold bricks of his own. His grandson Moses III began as an apprentice to a Pulaski builder in 1890 and founded the firm in Nashville in 1905, joined later by his brother Calvin in McKissack & McKissack. Their father, a master carpenter, did the gingerbread trim on the Maxwell House Hotel. The firm is the oldest Black-owned architecture and construction company in the United States.

What the plaque says

Gabriel McKissack During the years following the Civil War, Gabriel Moses McKissack (1840-1923) laid the foundation in Giles County for a family building tradition that included the first black architectural firm in the United States, Nashville's McKissack and McKissack. Numerous building throughout Tennessee were designed by the McKissack firm. A carpenter and a son of a master craftsman and freedman Moses I. Gabriel fathered six sons with whom many Giles County buildings are associated.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pulaski Public Square and the Giles County Courthouse — 0.6 mi
  The 1909 courthouse and nineteenth-century storefronts on Pulaski's square, in the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded and where the architect Moses McKissack III was born.
• James D. Vaughan Southern Gospel Music Museum — 18 mi
  A museum on the third floor of the Vaughan Municipal Building on the Lawrenceburg square, honoring the shape-note publisher who built a songbook, quartet and radio empire here from 1903.
• David Crockett State Park — 19 mi
  A Lawrenceburg park on Shoal Creek where Davy Crockett ran a gristmill, a powder mill and a distillery from 1817, and later broke with Andrew Jackson over Indian removal.
• Meriwether Lewis Site — 32 mi
  The place on the Natchez Trace Parkway where Meriwether Lewis died in October 1809, with his 1848 monument, a pioneer cemetery, a walk on the Old Trace and a free campground.

More markers nearby

• Bridgeforth High School — 0.2 mi
• Donald Grady Davidson and John Crowe Ransom — 0.6 mi
• Walter Herschel Beech — 0.8 mi
• Martin College — 0.9 mi