Struggling Through the Mountains

The man whose money helped found Sewanee had made it selling people. From 1828 John Armfield ran the Alexandria, Virginia, end of Franklin and Armfield, the largest slave-trading firm in the country, holding captives in a walled jail on Duke Street. In the early 1830s the firm sold about 1,200 people a year, shipping them by brig to New Orleans or marching them in chained coffles through Tennessee toward Natchez. Armfield retired to Tennessee, bought the Beersheba Springs resort in 1854, and in 1857 pledged $25,000 a year to the new university.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 4.4 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.
• Savage Gulf State Park — 18 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.
• 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.
• Tims Ford State Park — 22 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.

More markers nearby

• Monteagle Sunday School Assembly — 1.3 mi
• Crossroads of War — 1.9 mi
• Highlander Folk School 1932-1962 — 3.2 mi
• University of the South — 4.1 mi