Save Sewanee Black History Heritage Trail

Welcome to the Save Sewanee Black History Heritage Trail!

This "Story Map" is a guide to the sites and markers telling the history of our town’s African American community. The mission of the trail project is to honor and preserve the memory of this Sewanee neighborhood and its residents.

Most people who inquire about or visit Sewanee are focused on the University of the South, its liberal arts college and Episcopal seminary. Visitors tend to stick to the main road, like University Avenue, and marvel at the stone gothic buildings that conjure up comparisons with Hogwarts. 

But, as this map shows, there is much more to Sewanee and its history than the university alone. For many generations after its cornerstone was laid in 1860, on the eve of secession and civil war, Sewanee the town and place was home to a resilient and resourceful African American community. Its residents worked as custodians and cooks for the institution, as domestic servants for the town’s white families, and as Jacks-of-all-trades — garbage collectors, handymen, barbers, hostlers, gardeners — who did the everyday jobs that kept the “high class” white neighborhoods and the people who lived in them in good working order. Neither the University nor the town could have prospered without them.

Many of the Black people who moved to Sewanee after emancipation did so willingly and deliberately. They were attracted to the reliable employment the university offered, the cash wages it paid, and — compared to other areas of the South — living conditions that shielded African American people from the harshest discrimination and violence of the region’s Jim Crow racial order. 

The homes of Black people were clustered in several areas of town, but the core of the community was in the “bottom” land east of University Avenue and south of the main campus (highlighted in the image above). “St. Mark’s,” as it is called today, was a thriving neighborhood centered around the places marked on this Heritage Trail, like the “colored” cemetery and the Episcopal mission church. 

All of these segregated places were set aside, funded, or underwritten by the town’s white leaders, but the Black residents of Sewanee helped build and maintain them. They flocked to the “swimpool” to beat the heat and played games on the ball field. They staffed their own school with dedicated teachers and laid their loved ones to rest in their own cemetery. They gave life to these places and made them sites of joy and neighborly warmth in the university town they called home.

We encourage you to use this website to visit these sites in person to see and learn about these places. Each site has a dedicated parking area. You can easily access them by automobile in two ways: 

1) The best route is by State Route 41A: turn north on Alabama Avenue and Site No. 1, the “Willie Six Field,” is a quarter-mile up on the right.

2) If you are on the main University campus, turn east onto Georgia Avenue from University Avenue at the blinking traffic light and drive a quarter mile to Kennerly Road (just past Stirling’s Coffee House); turn right on Kennerly. The “colored” cemetery will be on your right; turn right on Palmetto Avenue and the cemetery Site No. 5 is immediately on your right. Continue down Palmetto for the additional sites.