Peter Turney

Turney's governorship is remembered for what it ended and how it began. He ended Tennessee's convict lease system and enacted other prison reforms. His second term opened under a cloud, because the Democratic legislature threw out thousands of votes for his Republican opponent, Henry Clay Evans, to confirm his 1894 win. Before that he sat twenty-three years on the state Supreme Court, and in 1891 his court ruled on two cases growing out of the Coal Creek War between striking miners and convict labor. Turney was born at Jasper.

What the plaque says

Peter Turney 1/8 mi. N.W. are ruins of the antebellum home of Peter Turney (1827-1903). Organizer and commander of the 1st Tennessee Infantry CSA until wounded; member of State Supreme Court, 1878-86; chief justice, 1886-93; governor; 1893-97. The house was burned by Federals in 1863, in reprisal for his secessionist activities.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 9.4 mi
  The Episcopal university on the Cumberland Plateau, founded in 1857 as a school for the slaveholding South and now examining that history through its own Roberson Project.
• Tims Ford State Park — 10 mi
  A lake park on the Elk River below the Cumberland Plateau, made by a 1970 TVA dam on land the Cherokee and Chickasaw ceded by treaty in the early 1800s.
• Jack Daniel Distillery — 18 mi
  The oldest registered distillery in the United States, in a limestone hollow outside Lynchburg, where the tour now names Nathan Nearest Green, an enslaved man, as the first master distiller.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 21 mi
  A 2,000-year-old enclosure of piled stone and earth on the bluffs above the forks of the Duck River, built by Native people between about 80 and 550 A.D., with a museum and waterfall trails.

More markers nearby

• The Blind Knight — 1.5 mi
• Secession — 1.8 mi
• Albert Smith Marks — 2.2 mi
• Cowan Railroad Museum — 4.1 mi