Lincoln and Cumberland Gap

The university began with a minister and his wife, not a general. The Reverend Arthur A. Myers and Ellen Myers came to Cumberland Gap in 1888 for the American Missionary Association and started a Congregational church and a school just as the area's New South boom collapsed. Their Harrow School soon moved into one of the bankrupt hotels. In 1895 Myers brought Howard to speak at commencement and then showed him a six-hundred-acre former plantation. Howard's own Lincoln and Civil War memorabilia, with gifts from his friends, became the core of the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum collection.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, and the Wilderness Road — 1.4 mi
  The Claiborne County town below the notch in Cumberland Mountain where Daniel Boone's axmen widened the Warriors' Path into the Wilderness Road in 1775, now bypassed by a tunnel.
• Norris Dam and Norris Dam State Park — 34 mi
  TVA's first dam, finished in 1936 on the Clinch River, and the state park beside it with the 1798 Rice Grist Mill, built for a valley whose families were moved out.

More markers nearby

• Lincoln Memorial University — steps away
• Three States Cornerstone — 1.5 mi
• Yoakum's Station — 10 mi
• Barren Creek Dam Failures — 11 mi