Cordell Hull Birthplace and Museum State Park

Cordell Hull was born on October 2, 1871, in a log cabin in what is now Pickett County, to William and Elizabeth Riley Hull. His family was poor and he came up in the isolated Mountain Section of Middle Tennessee, taught first at home and then in free schools. His father worked in timber, and Overton County's history lists "Uncle Billy" Hull among the loggers who made money floating logs down to the Cumberland River.

From there Hull went into law, a judgeship and Congress, where in 1913 he wrote the income tax law, and then the Senate. Franklin Roosevelt made him secretary of state in 1933, and he held the post for eleven years, pushing lower tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements and then a postwar organization of nations. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in establishing the United Nations and is remembered as the Father of the United Nations. Illness pushed him from office in 1944, and he never came back to the mountains where he was born.

The state acquired the twenty-acre site in 1990. The log cabin on it is a replica, rebuilt in 1952 and again in 1995, and the site is the only place in Pickett County tied directly to Hull. A museum finished in 1996 holds the belongings he left to his niece, Katherine Hull Ethridge, with the understanding that they would come home once there was a place for them.