The Underground Railroad: Friendsville Quakers and Cudjo's Cave

Quakers settled Friendsville around 1796 carrying a testimony against war and slavery, and a Friends meeting still gathers there weekly. William J. Hackney sheltered people in a nearby cave, and the American Battlefield Trust credits him with helping more than 2,000 self-emancipated people, conscientious objectors and Unionists; he turned down a reward and a place on General Burnside's staff. John Townsend Trowbridge's 1863 novel Cudjo's Cave borrowed the setting, though in 1895 Trowbridge said he had found no authentic news of the people in it. The cave is no longer open to the public.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 13 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.
• Sequoyah Birthplace Museum — 13 mi
  The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' museum on Tellico Lake, near the town where Sequoyah was born, telling how he built the Cherokee syllabary and what the Tellico Dam drowned.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 19 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.
• Blount Mansion — 19 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.

More markers nearby

• Sam Houston Homesite — 5.0 mi
• National Campground — 7.0 mi
• Lenoir Cotton Mill — 7.4 mi
• Battle of Campbell's Station — 8.5 mi