Kate Bradford Stockton 1880-1969

Stockton's 1936 campaign was run on almost nothing. She started the fund with five dollars of her own and asked supporters to send a dollar a month, and with the roads poor she rode a horse ten miles to catch the train. After a Memphis rally, a Shelby County sheriff warned he could not protect her from thrown tomatoes. She won 3,786 of 410,814 votes. Years earlier she and her husband had offered land to Myles Horton, and he filed the charter for Highlander School in Fentress County before it moved to Grundy County.

What the plaque says

Kate Bradford Stockton 1880-1969 Kate Bradford Stockton was born in Stockton, California, in 1880. Four years later, she moved with her parents to Fentress County. She was the descendant of a distinguished family of radical thinkers, and was the product of the Upper Cumberland radical tradition. In 1936, running on the Socialist Party ticket, she was the first woman to run for governor of Tennessee. Her gubernatorial candidacy was part of a national effort by the Socialist Party to place a candidate on the ballot in every state. Her childhood home was a two-story log structure 1200 yards west of here. An author, poet, and humanist, Kate Bradford Stockton died on August 19, 1969, and was buried in the Stockton Cemetery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Muddy Pond Mennonite Community — 5.6 mi
  A Mennonite farming community in Overton County near Monterey, known for sorghum syrup pressed and boiled each fall and for the farm stores along its roads.
• Cumberland Homesteads and the Homesteads Tower — 19 mi
  The largest of the New Deal's subsistence homestead communities, a plateau district of Crab Orchard sandstone houses around an octagonal stone tower that now holds a museum.
• Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area at Bandy Creek — 28 mi
  The Tennessee gateway to a 125,000-acre Cumberland Plateau river gorge, from the Bandy Creek Visitor Center near Oneida, with Twin Arches and the old No Business country.
• Standing Stone State Park — 30 mi
  A New Deal park on Mill Creek named for a vanished stone that Native peoples revered and railroad builders blasted, with a lake, 1930s cabins and a marbles championship.

More markers nearby

• Standing Stone — 14 mi
• Stokes' Atrocity — 14 mi
• John Wood Dodge — 17 mi
• Mark Twain Spring — 18 mi