The Blind Knight

Campbell's work carried him far from the hills around Winchester. He began as a student at the Tennessee School for the Blind in 1844 and was teaching music there by 1850. He later directed music at the Wisconsin school and taught at the Perkins Institute in Watertown, Massachusetts. In 1871 he helped Thomas Armitage establish the Royal Normal College and Academy for the Blind near the Crystal Palace in London, and he crossed the Atlantic often in the years that followed.

What the plaque says

The Blind Knight 4½ mi. S.E., near Liberty, Francis Joseph Campbell lived as a boy. Blinded in 1836, when 4 years old, he was educated in the first class of the State School for the Blind, later in Boston and Europe. Settling in England, his success in educating the blind and making them self-reliant earned him knighthood. He died in 1914.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tims Ford State Park — 8.9 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.
• Sewanee: The University of the South — 11 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.
• Jack Daniel Distillery — 17 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 — 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.

More markers nearby

• Albert Smith Marks — 1.1 mi
• Secession — 1.3 mi
• Peter Turney — 1.5 mi
• Cowan Railroad Museum — 5.4 mi