King College

King College began as a high school and a gift. In April 1866 the Holston Presbytery met at Pleasant Grove Church in Bristol to found a college, and the Reverend James King donated 25 acres and three buildings. Classes opened in August 1867 as Bristol High School, and the Tennessee charter then renamed it for King. When it outgrew the small campus, King's grandson Isaac Anderson gave a hillside east of town, and the college moved there in 1917. It became King University in 2013 and began a doctoral program in nursing the next year.

What the plaque says

King College Located 4 miles to the east in Bristol, Tennessee. Founded in 1867 by the Reverend James King and other Presbyterian leaders to provide "a thorough classical and scientific training, combined with moral and religious instruction." Since 1915 this four-year liberal arts college has been conducted by the Synod of Appalachia.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bristol's State Street and the 1927 Sessions — 4.0 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 — 12 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 — 14 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 — 15 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

• The Bristol Municipal Stadium — 3.3 mi
• Tennessee Ernie Ford's Birthplace — 3.4 mi
• John Isaac Cox — 3.9 mi
• Evan Shelby — 4.1 mi