Mount Granger

Gideon Granger was a Connecticut lawyer and Jeffersonian pamphleteer who became Postmaster General in 1801 and served until 1814, the longest tenure of anyone in the office. A frontier mail stop took his name in 1806. After leaving Washington he settled in Canandaigua, New York, and became a key figure in the Erie Canal project. Brotherton, where Mount Granger stood, was already a junction: Walton's first road section, finished in 1795, ran from Carthage to meet the North Carolina Military Trace here, so the mail followed a route that settlers had opened.

What the plaque says

Mount Granger Located 1/4 mile south of this point on what was originally Old Walton Road, Mount Granger was the western destruction point for all U.S. mail to the southwestern frontier. In 1806 Mount Granger was named in honor of the Hon. Gideon Granger, Postmaster General. This historic site is located in what is today known as the Brotherton Community.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cookeville Depot Museum — 7.1 mi
  The 1909 Tennessee Central Railroad depot in Cookeville's west side, now a museum with a model of the town in 1955 and a steam engine in the yard.
• Cummins Falls State Park — 11 mi
  A 75-foot waterfall and swimming hole on the Blackburn Fork, saved from a housing development in 2011 and opened as Tennessee's 54th state park.
• Muddy Pond Mennonite Community — 15 mi
  A Mennonite farming community in Overton County near Monterey, known for sorghum syrup pressed and boiled each fall and for the farm stores along its roads.
• Burgess Falls State Park — 16 mi
  A day-use park on the Falling Water River, where a short trail passes three smaller falls on its way to a drop of more than 130 feet into a limestone gorge.

More markers nearby

• Cherokee Oak — 2.6 mi
• White Plains — 3.5 mi
• Capshaw School — 6.5 mi
• Israel Putnam 1717 - 1790 — 6.6 mi