John Isaac Cox

Cox was orphaned at eight after his father was killed fighting for the Confederacy, carried mail at sixteen and served as a justice of the peace at twenty-one, with only two terms at Blountville's Jefferson Academy and private study. He reached the governor's office by succession. He counted among his achievements sending state troops to protect replacement workers during a Tracy City coal strike, a move labor groups did not support. The state flag designed by Lee Roy Reeves was adopted on his watch. Malcolm Patterson beat him in 1907, and he returned to the state Senate until 1912.

What the plaque says

John Isaac Cox Born in a house 300 yards east of this road, Oct. 23, 1857, he held nearly every public office in his county, besides being three times member of the General Assembly. While Speaker of the State Senate, he became Governor to succeed James B. Frazier, March 21, 1905. He died Sept. 5. 1946, and is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Bristol.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bristol's State Street and the 1927 Sessions — 7.9 mi
  The Tennessee side of the street that is also the state line, where producer Ralph Peer recorded 76 songs in the summer of 1927, with the Birthplace of Country Music Museum a few blocks away in Virginia.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 7.9 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.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 11 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.
• Warriors' Path State Park — 12 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.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Blountville — 3.6 mi
• King College — 3.9 mi
• The Bristol Municipal Stadium — 7.1 mi
• Tennessee Ernie Ford's Birthplace — 7.2 mi