Lincoln Memorial University

The early school opened a door for families with no money for tuition: students could work their way through on the college farm. Its course list ran from classical Greek and Latin to medicine and farm management. General Howard's brochures framed it as a debt owed to Union mountaineers, a school for the children of Union veterans set on what they called slave soil. Howard and his friends gave the Civil War and Lincoln relics that became the core of the Abraham Lincoln Museum, one of the largest Lincoln collections in the country.

What the plaque says

Lincoln Memorial University "If you come through this misery alive... I want you to do something for all those mountain people who have been shut out of the world all these years." These words of President Abraham Lincoln to General O. O. Howard in 1863 proved to be the catalyst for the founding of LMU. Chartered on February 12, 1897, as a liberal arts university and the home of the Abraham Lincoln Museum. LMU continues its mission of providing an advanced education to people of this region.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, and the Wilderness Road — 1.3 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 — 35 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 and Cumberland Gap — steps away
• Three States Cornerstone — 1.4 mi
• Yoakum's Station — 10 mi
• Barren Creek Dam Failures — 12 mi