Mulberry Grove

Cocke is credited with helping persuade John Sevier to lead the State of Franklin, and he served that short-lived state as councillor and brigadier general. At Mulberry Grove he held 960 acres with a small ironworks, gristmill and sawmill. He sat in the first state constitutional convention and was among Tennessee's first two U.S. senators. His later years were rougher: in 1812 he became the first Tennessee judge impeached and removed from office, for using his position for private gain. He then served as federal agent to the Chickasaws.

What the plaque says

Mulberry Grove About 2 1/2 miles south, now under water, William Cocke had his plantation. A veteran of the Revolution and the War of 1812, he served in the legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, Franklin, Transylvania, Territory South of the River Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi. He was U.S. Senator from Tennessee 1796 to 1805.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — 13 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Vardy Community Museum — 16 mi
  A 1899 Presbyterian church in Hancock County, now a museum, beside the Mahala Mullins cabin and the ruins of the Vardy school that educated the Melungeon children of Newman's Ridge.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 25 mi
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, and the Wilderness Road — 30 mi
  The Claiborne County town below the notch in Cumberland Mountain where Daniel Boone's axmen widened the Warriors' Path into the Wilderness Road in 1775, now bypassed by a tunnel.

More markers nearby

• Longstreet's Billet — 6.1 mi
• Hayslope — 6.1 mi
• Morristown College — 9.3 mi
• Morris Cemetery — 10.0 mi