Last Stagecoach Hold-Up

The coach was robbed eight years before the first railroad reached Cookeville. The Nashville and Knoxville Railroad arrived from the west in 1890, and the Tennessee Central connected Monterey to the Southern Railway at Harriman in 1893. Until then the road west followed the Walton Road, where tollgates and stands had served travelers since 1801; U.S. 70N was later built on its course in western Putnam County. The Walton Road served the traveling public into the twentieth century.

What the plaque says

Last Stagecoach Hold-Up Here, about midnight, Oct. 15, 1882, "Bug" Hunt and "the two Edward boys," held up the Cookeville-Nashville stagecoach driven by John Rayburn, robbed mail and passengers, but missed the registered pouch and quantity of money on a passenger. Hunt was later caught and went to prison; the others escaped.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cummins Falls State Park — 13 mi
  A 75-foot waterfall and swimming hole on the Blackburn Fork, saved from a housing development in 2011 and opened as Tennessee's 54th state park.
• Burgess Falls State Park — 14 mi
  A day-use park on the Falling Water River, where a short trail passes three smaller falls on its way to a drop of more than 130 feet into a limestone gorge.
• Cookeville Depot Museum — 15 mi
  The 1909 Tennessee Central Railroad depot in Cookeville's west side, now a museum with a model of the town in 1955 and a steam engine in the yard.
• Red Boiling Springs — 25 mi
  A Macon County spa town built around red sulphur springs, with five kinds of mineral water, red-painted pumps and the surviving hotels of a resort that once held more than a dozen.

More markers nearby

• Buffalo Valley School — 2.7 mi
• Center Hill Dam / Center Hill Powerhouse — 6.3 mi
• Granville — 6.5 mi
• Richard Fielding Cooke — 9.1 mi