Monteagle Sunday School Assembly

The assembly grew from a 1882 plan by Tennessee Sunday school workers to copy New York's Chautauqua. Monteagle won the site when the Tennessee Coal and Railroad Company and the town's founder, John Moffatt, each gave five thousand dollars and the railroad donated about eleven hundred acres. Over a thousand people came in 1883 and camped in tents on the ninety-six-acre grounds. Members soon built their own cottages on leased lots, and 161 remain, most from before 1930. An amphitheater came first, in 1883; the present auditorium dates from 1927.

What the plaque says

Monteagle Sunday School Assembly MSSA differed from other Chautauquas and is significant is that it was ecumenical from the beginning. Known as the Chautauqua of the South, it has conducted annual assemblies for religious and educational programs without interruption since 1883. In 1982, MSSA was placed in the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior. It features outstanding and unusual Victorian and early 20th century cottage architecture on a campus of 354 acres containing more than 160 cottages and 15 public buildings.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 5.3 mi
  The Episcopal university on the Cumberland Plateau, founded in 1857 as a school for the slaveholding South and now examining that history through its own Roberson Project.
• Savage Gulf State Park — 17 mi
  Roughly 19,000 acres of gorge and sandstone bluff on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, a state park of its own since 2022, with the Stone Door and a National Natural Landmark.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 22 mi
  A 2,000-year-old enclosure of piled stone and earth on the bluffs above the forks of the Duck River, built by Native people between about 80 and 550 A.D., with a museum and waterfall trails.
• Tims Ford State Park — 23 mi
  A lake park on the Elk River below the Cumberland Plateau, made by a 1970 TVA dam on land the Cherokee and Chickasaw ceded by treaty in the early 1800s.

More markers nearby

• Crossroads of War — 0.6 mi
• Struggling Through the Mountains — 1.3 mi
• Highlander Folk School 1932-1962 — 2.1 mi
• University of the South — 5.0 mi