Saint's Rest

The cabin that once stood here was the writing studio of Sarah Barnwell Elliott, a bishop's daughter. She lived in New York from 1895 to 1902 but made Sewanee her principal home and set The Durket Sperret, a local-color novel, in the area. Jerry, the tragic story of a Tennessee mountain boy who grows up in the West, is her best remembered book. Her 1899 short pieces treat southern racial and social problems. As president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association she wrote the petition printed in the Nashville Banner in 1912.

What the plaque says

Saint's Rest At this site stands Saints Rest, among the three oldest remaining houses in Sewanee. Erected in 1870 by Charlotte Bull Barnwell Elliott, widow of a founding Episcopal bishop from Georgia, Stephen Elliott, it was part of the postwar revival of the University. A pre-Civil War cabin on this site was the writing studio of Sarah Barnwell Elliott, Tennessee suffragist. Saints Rest echoes the name of "Rebel's Rest" which stood from 1866 to 2014 north of this site. The cottage next door, "Sinners Hope," suggests the delight in house naming among Sewanee residents.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — steps away
  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 — 19 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.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 22 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.
• Savage Gulf State Park — 22 mi
  Roughly 19,000 acres of gorge and sandstone bluff on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, a state park of its own since 2022, with the Stone Door and a National Natural Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Desegregation of Franklin County Public Schools — 0.3 mi
• University of the South — 0.5 mi
• Monteagle Sunday School Assembly — 5.4 mi
• Cowan Railroad Museum — 5.7 mi