Luke Edward Wright

Wright's work reached across the Pacific. As governor-general of the Philippines from 1904 he left a mark at Baguio, where Wright Park takes its name from him and its long, shallow reflecting pool is credited to his design. Back in Memphis he had helped set up the relief committee during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Roosevelt sent him to Tokyo as ambassador in 1906, then made him secretary of war in 1908, where he pressed to weed out unfit officers and to take up aviation. He resigned in under a year and is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery.

What the plaque says

Luke Edward Wright 1846-1922 A Confederate officer who was cited for gallantry, he held the office of attorney-general for Shelby County. Wright also served as the first governor-general of the Philippines and as the first official ambassador to Japan, and under President Theodore Roosevelt, as secretary of war. He died in his house which stood here. The original circa-1840 carriage house was restored in 1975.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sun Studio — 0.3 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• Beale Street — 0.8 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.3 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.3 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Woodruff-Fontaine House — steps away
• Mallory-Neely House — steps away
• Nathan Bedford Forrest — 0.3 mi
• The First Railroad in West Tennessee The LaGrange & Memphis Railroad — 0.3 mi