The Giles County Courthouse is the fifth to stand on this square since 1811, a neoclassical building finished in 1909 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Around it runs a commercial district of buildings from the 1860s to the 1930s, including Antoinette Hall, the opera house built in 1868 after a fire destroyed the east side of the square. The Giles County Historical Society publishes a downtown walking tour that starts here.
Pulaski is where the Ku Klux Klan began. Six Confederate veterans founded it in a Pulaski law office, and historians date the founding to December 1865 or to 1866. It started as a social club and within a few years became a terrorist movement that used violence and intimidation to drive freedpeople and Republicans out of politics; its activity was especially strong in counties that included Giles, Lincoln, Marshall and Maury. Attempts to stage Klan activities in Pulaski have met stiff resistance from the town.
The town's other history is worth the time. Moses McKissack III was born in Pulaski in 1879, went to work for a Pulaski architect as a boy and moved to Nashville in 1905, where McKissack and McKissack became Tennessee's first professional African American architectural firm. James D. Vaughan, the father of southern gospel music, was born in Giles County in 1864.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour