University of the South

Poverty after 1868 brought one benefit: teachers who could not find work elsewhere. Josiah Gorgas, a Confederate brigadier, taught the sciences, and General Edmund Kirby Smith taught math. By 1900 about three hundred students could study classics, theology, medicine, law and engineering, and the football team went undefeated in 1898 and 1899. Money ran short after 1909 and enrollment fell to about a hundred, until Alexander Guerry took over in 1938 and restored it. Dramatist Tennessee Williams left a bequest honoring his grandfather, a theology student here in the 1890s.

What the plaque says

University of the South Founded Jan. 6, 1858, under charter granting perpetual direction by the Episcopal Church in Ala., Ark., Ga., La., Miss., N. Car., S. Car., Tenn., and Texas. Nearby, Leonidas Polk, Bishop of La., later Lt. Gen., C.S.A., laid the cornerstone for the central building, October 10, 1860. Destroyed by Federal troops, in July, 1863.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 0.3 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.
• 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

• Saint's Rest — 0.5 mi
• Desegregation of Franklin County Public Schools — 0.8 mi
• Struggling Through the Mountains — 4.1 mi
• Monteagle Sunday School Assembly — 5.0 mi