Maryville College

Isaac Anderson's seminary became a college that opened its doors across racial lines. By the late nineteenth century, Black and white students attended together, and the school had also reached out to local Cherokee students; it was known as a center of southern abolitionist thought. The Freedmen's Bureau helped pay for Anderson Hall in 1869. Jim Crow law in the early twentieth century then barred Black students. Maryville ended segregation immediately after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and was the first college in Tennessee to welcome African Americans back.

What the plaque says

Maryville College Founded in 1819 by the Synod of Tennessee, Presbyterian Church in the USA, as The Southern and Western Theological Seminary, its first president was Rev. Isaac Anderson, D.D. Its original buildings were on Broadway at College Street. Receiving its present name in 1842, it was moved to its present location in 1871.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cades Cove — 14 mi
  A Smokies valley ringed by mountains, once the Cherokee hunting ground of Tsiyahi and later a farming community of 685 people, kept by the park after its families were bought out.
• Blount Mansion — 14 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 15 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 18 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.

More markers nearby

• Louis Philippe's Visit — 0.5 mi
• Where Houston Enlisted — 0.5 mi
• William Bennett Scott, Sr. ca. 1821-1885 — 0.6 mi
• Montvale Springs — 0.7 mi