George Gibbs Dibrell April 12, 1822 - May 9, 1888

Census slave schedules show Dibrell holding four enslaved people in 1850, a woman of 45, a girl of 12 and two boys aged four and two, and sixteen in 1860, aged from one year to fifty. After the war he turned to industry. He owned fifteen thousand acres in White County and founded the Bon Air Coal and Coke Company in 1882, though historians think the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railroad was the real power behind it. As a conservative Democrat he opposed railroad regulation and lost the 1886 governor's nomination to Robert L. Taylor.

What the plaque says

George Gibbs Dibrell April 12, 1822 - May 9, 1888 Born in a house which stood here. A leading citizen, he was elected a Union delegate to the proposed secession convention of 1861, but enlisted for the Confederacy at Tennessee's withdrawal; recruited and commanded brigades under Forrest and Wheeler; on the flight from Richmond was the guardian of Confederate archives. Member of Congress, 1874-84; prominent in a railroad and coal mining activities in this area. He is buried in Sparta.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Burgess Falls State Park — 12 mi
  A day-use park on the Falling Water River, where a short trail passes three smaller falls on its way to a drop of more than 130 feet into a limestone gorge.
• Rock Island State Park — 13 mi
  A park where the Collins, Rocky and Caney Fork rivers meet at the head of Center Hill Lake, with a gorge of waterfalls below a 1917 dam and the remains of a cotton-mill town.
• Cookeville Depot Museum — 17 mi
  The 1909 Tennessee Central Railroad depot in Cookeville's west side, now a museum with a model of the town in 1955 and a steam engine in the yard.
• Fall Creek Falls State Park — 19 mi
  A New Deal park on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, where Cane Creek has cut a gorge and a 256-foot waterfall drops into it.

More markers nearby

• Lester Flatt June 19, 1914 - May 11, 1979 — steps away
• Bragg Invades Kentucky Setember - October 1862 — 1.3 mi
• The Rock House — 3.0 mi
• Eli Sims (Simms) February 1, 1776-September 14, 1862 — 6.8 mi