Orion Clemenes 1825-1897

Orion Clemens was the eldest of seven children, and in 1839 the family left Tennessee for Hannibal, Missouri. A Republican who supported Lincoln and thought slavery morally wrong, he was appointed Secretary of the new Nevada Territory in 1861 at a salary of $1,800 a year. His younger brother Sam went west with him that summer and later wrote about the journey. Orion's wife Mollie died in 1864, which hurt him and his career, and he quit a low-paid seat in the state assembly and left Nevada in 1866.

What the plaque says

Orion Clemenes 1825-1897 Orion Clemens was born to John and Jane Lampton Clemens on July 7, 1825, in Gainesboro. Orion became a writer, printer, inventor, lawyer, secretary and Acting Governor of the Nevada Territory during the Lincoln Administration. After the Civil War, he returned to his birthplace once. He was the older brother of Samuel Clemens, who is better known as Mark Twain.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cummins Falls State Park — 8.8 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.
• Cookeville Depot Museum — 16 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.
• Standing Stone State Park — 16 mi
  A New Deal park on Mill Creek named for a vanished stone that Native peoples revered and railroad builders blasted, with a lake, 1930s cabins and a marbles championship.
• Red Boiling Springs — 16 mi
  A Macon County spa town built around red sulphur springs, with five kinds of mineral water, red-painted pumps and the surviving hotels of a resort that once held more than a dozen.

More markers nearby

• Michaux's Discovery 1796 — steps away
• Alvan Cullen Gillem July 29, 1830 - December 2, 1875 — steps away
• The Austin Peay Bridge — 1.3 mi
• Judge John Jordan Gore — 3.2 mi