Sewanee: The University of the South

In 1857 citizens of Franklin County and the Sewanee Mining Company offered 10,000 acres of the Cumberland Plateau to the Episcopal bishops of the South, who wanted a university at an altitude above the malaria line. Bishops Leonidas Polk, Stephen Elliott and James Hervey Otey led the project, the cornerstone was laid in 1860, and the Civil War wrecked the plan. The University of the South opened in 1868 with nine students and four professors.

The university's own Roberson Project, begun in 2017, concluded that Sewanee was the only college designed from the start to represent and promote the South's slaveholding society. Records show that enslaved people, hired or leased out to the organizers, cleared the plateau and built its first roads and structures. Polk, who kept a home here, enslaved an estimated 200 to 300 or more people on his Louisiana plantation, and all but four of the original 37 trustees held people in bondage. The researchers found no evidence that the university itself ever owned anyone. In 2020 its Board of Regents rejected the university's past veneration of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause.

The Roberson Project also records Black Sewanee: the community that grew up here in the twentieth century despite Jim Crow, and the Black students who broke the university's segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. The campus is open to walk, and All Saints' Chapel is the usual place to begin.