Montgomery Bell

Bell's ledger held more than iron. By one account he owned over three hundred people at his works, and a record made in 1859 lists more than a hundred names, among them Caesar, Celia, Cudjo, Cuffy, Easter and Gabriel. He sent fifty freed people to Liberia in 1835 and fifty more in 1853, emancipated another hundred and fifty, and hired a Philadelphia teacher to teach them to read and write when that was illegal. His will left $20,000 for the schooling of poor children, the foundation of Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville.

What the plaque says

Montgomery Bell Born in Pennsylvania in 1759, he came to Tennessee in 1802 from Lexington, Ky., where he had worked as a hatter and tanner. Here he developed several forges and furnaces. With success, he endowed the school in Nashville bearing his name; he was also a prominent turfman. He is buried about 5 miles northeast.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 17 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 18 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 18 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 18 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Patterson Forge — steps away
• Mound Bottom — 0.9 mi
• Connection To Johnsonville — 1.9 mi
• Smith Farmhouse — 8.9 mi