Grace M. Eaton/Grace M. Eaton Dayhome

Grace Eaton came to Nashville in 1911 to help the Baptist missionary Joanna Patterson Moore. Moore, born in Clarion County, Pennsylvania, in 1832, was the first white woman missionary appointed by the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society. In November 1863 she went to Island Number Ten in the Mississippi to work with about 1,000 Black women and children who had sought protection from the Union Army. She later worked in Helena, Arkansas, Lauderdale, Mississippi, and New Orleans, founded the monthly Hope, and published her autobiography in 1902. She died in Selma in 1916.

What the plaque says

Grace M. Eaton/Grace M. Eaton Dayhome Grace M. Eaton was born on May 6, 1866, in Wakefield, Mass. She was affiliated with the "Woman's American Baptist Home Society" which founded the Fireside School, an organization dedication to the uplift of Blacks, epically in the South. Eaton came to Nashville in 1911 with Joanna P. Moore to assist in the opening of a Fireside School. She used her resources to open the first day care facility for African-American children. Eaton died on Aug. 18, 1946. Her funeral was held two days later at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church (Black). At Eaton's request, her body was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. continued: Grace M. Eaton Day Home - Founded in 1926, this day care agency was named in honor of Grace M. Eaton, a white Baptist missionary. Lizzie Kelley, a black probation officer of the juvenile court and a Fireside School member, proposed a day home for black children of working mothers. Eaton sold her Mass. farm, rented a house at 612 Gay Street, and opened a day home for black children. Later, a new site was bought at 1402 Jo Johnston. In 1939, the Eaton Day Home moved to 505 17th Ave., No. The child care facility also housed a medical clinic. In 1976, the day home moved to this locale, the former side of the YWCA's Blue Triangle branch.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.7 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.0 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.0 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.2 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• William Edmondson — steps away
• First State Penitentiary — 0.2 mi
• Bethlehem Centers of Nashville 100th Anniversary (1894-1994) — 0.2 mi
• John Robert Bradley — 0.3 mi