Masonic Female Institute

Myra Inman began her diary on New Year's Day 1859, at thirteen, in a Cleveland of about 250 people. Bradley County voted 1,382 to 507 to stay in the Union, but Myra was a committed Confederate, and she wrote the Union occupation down as a loss. Her pages also name the people her family held in bondage, Emeline, Aunt Phoebe, George and Susan, and record in August 1863 that the household had no enslaved servants for the first time she could remember. She kept writing until January 1866, and the original is at the University of North Carolina.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Red Clay State Historic Park — 13 mi
  The last seat of the Cherokee Nation before removal, where eleven general councils met from 1832 to 1837, now a state park with a council house replica, a sacred spring and an eternal flame.
• Cherokee Trail of Tears State Park — 19 mi
  The Blythe Ferry landing at the mouth of the Hiwassee, where Cherokee and Muscogee people camped in 1838 to cross the Tennessee River, made a state park in June 2026.
• Ocoee Whitewater Center — 24 mi
  The Forest Service site on the Ocoee River in Cherokee National Forest that hosted the 1996 Olympic canoe slalom, on a river that TVA dams and releases by schedule.
• Rhea County Courthouse — 24 mi
  The 1891 Dayton courthouse where John T. Scopes was tried in July 1925 for teaching evolution, with the second-floor courtroom restored and a trial museum in the basement.

More markers nearby

• Cleveland During the Civil War — 0.4 mi
• Cherokee History — 9.6 mi
• Charleston on the Hiwassee — 11 mi
• Marr's Fort — 11 mi