Nashoba

Frances Wright began Nashoba in 1825 as a test of her plan for emancipation without loss to slaveholders: enslaved people would work to buy their freedom, then be sent to Haiti or the settlements that became Liberia. Until then they remained her property, and they could never become trustees. Wright left for Europe in 1827 to recover from malaria, and the community had collapsed by her return in 1828. She then chartered a ship, took the remaining enslaved people to Haiti and freed them there.

What the plaque says

Nashoba To the south lay this plantation. Here, in 1827, a Scottish spinster heiress named Francis Wright set up a colony whose aims were the enforcement of cooperative living and other advanced sociological experiments. It failed in 1830.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elmwood Cemetery — 9.7 mi
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.
• Sun Studio — 9.8 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 10.0 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Beale Street — 11 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.

More markers nearby

• Christian Brothers High School — 2.8 mi
• St. Mary's Episcopal School — 3.7 mi
• Raleigh — 3.8 mi
• Sgt. Walter K. Singleton — 5.0 mi