The red brick Rhea County Courthouse was built in 1890 and 1891, after the county seat moved from Washington to Dayton, to a Knoxville firm's design in a mix of Romanesque Revival and Italian Villa styles. It still holds county offices. In July 1925 it held the trial of John T. Scopes, a Dayton high school football coach and science teacher charged under Tennessee's new Butler Act with teaching evolution. The ACLU had offered to defend a teacher in a test case, and Dayton's civic leaders took it up to draw publicity.
The trial ran from July 10 to 21. William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution as a special prosecutor, and Clarence Darrow joined the ACLU's defense team. The judge ruled out expert testimony on science, and the high point came on July 20, when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible. The jury convicted Scopes in under ten minutes and he was fined $100. Bryan died in Dayton five days later. In 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court held that the Butler Act was constitutional but threw out the conviction because the judge, not a jury, had set the fine, and it urged the state not to retry him. The legislature repealed the act in 1967.
The second-floor courtroom has been restored to look as it did in 1925. The Rhea County Museum, also called the Scopes Trial Museum, sits in the basement and holds trial records, photographs, the broadcast microphone and an audiovisual history. The courthouse is a National Historic Landmark.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour