Suffering and Survival

Jerome Pierce had been enslaved, his grandson said, and kept the surname of the family that held him. On March 27, 1888 he bought 163 acres on Bays Mountain from Nancy Hayes Vincent for fifty-three dollars. There he built a two-story log cabin with a rock chimney and raised seven children, who farmed hogs, chickens and grapes and shared food with white neighbors. Jerome and his son Albert helped build the dam atop the mountain with Belgian horses, and the family later logged for Eastman's sawmill. Jerome died in 1945 and lies in the Pierce Chapel A.M.E. Cemetery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Warriors' Path State Park — 3.7 mi
  A state park around Fort Patrick Henry Lake on the Holston at Kingsport, named for the Great Indian Warpath, with an unfinished late-1800s railroad grade, mountain-bike trails and a marina.
• Long Island of the Holston — 5.3 mi
  A four-mile island in the Holston at Kingsport, Cherokee council and treaty ground, the start of Boone's Wilderness Road in 1775, and in part returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1976.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 13 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 14 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.

More markers nearby

• Donelson's Flotilla — 3.1 mi
• Douglass High School — 3.6 mi
• Battle of Island Flats — 3.7 mi
• Ford vs. Ford — 4.5 mi