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Athens
McMinn County Courthouse Square
6 East Madison Avenue, Athens
Directions: I-75 to Exit 49. Follow TN 30-E to approximately 3 miles. Turn right on Jackson Street a short distance, bear right on North White, then left on East Madison.
As a transportation crossroads, the courthouse square was a center of activity for both Confederate and Federal soldiers. Anna Marie Deaderick Van Dyke recalled: Athens was often raiding ground- today the Confederates, tomorrow the Yankees. She remembered living three months solely on Irish potatoes and corn bread and had been nauseated on the fancy coffee of dried apples, sweet potatoes, and rye. On the courthouse grounds once stood a Grand Army of the Republic monument, originally erected in 1925.
Immediately north of the town square is the Free Hill community, established by free African Americans in the antebellum era. Prominent residents included tradesmen Robert “Bob” McGaughey, Clint Cleage and Nelson Gettys.
In 1865, Rev. William Heyward Ferguson, local residents, and newly emancipated slaves established St. Mark’s African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Zion Church. During Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau supported Free Hill’s first school, taught by Rev. Ferguson. The school stood nearby St. Mark’s, the first permanent building, erected in 1867.
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