Historical Marker
The Rock House
Sparta, White County · Tennessee
The Rock House is valued as a rare survivor of the turnpike era. It began as a toll house and stage stop on a busy antebellum turnpike between Sparta and Crossville, and its builder was still running a store there as late as 1852. The symmetrical, three-bay, one-story stone structure was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Today it is a public historic site run locally by the Rock House Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which shows travelers where the plateau gives way to the Calfkiller valley.
What the plaque says
The Rock House Built of Tennessee sandstone between 1835 and 1839 by Barlow and Madison Fisk, the Rock House served as a frontier toll house and stagecoach inn along the Wilderness Trail. President Andrew Jackson stopped here on his trips to and from Washington to visit Samuel Denton, owner and operator of the Rock House. Other notable visitors included President James K. Polk and Sam Houston.
Where it stands
35.92011, -85.40390 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Burgess Falls State Park — 14 miA day-use park on the Falling Water River, where a short trail passes three smaller falls on its way to a drop of more than 130 feet into a limestone gorge.
- Rock Island State Park — 15 miA park where the Collins, Rocky and Caney Fork rivers meet at the head of Center Hill Lake, with a gorge of waterfalls below a 1917 dam and the remains of a cotton-mill town.
- Cookeville Depot Museum — 18 miThe 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.
- Fall Creek Falls State Park — 18 miA New Deal park on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, where Cane Creek has cut a gorge and a 256-foot waterfall drops into it.