Rebel's Rest: Sewanee Rises From Ruin

The two modest log cabins that once stood near this spot were the entire University of the South at its postwar resurrection. In eighteen sixty-six, Episcopal Bishop Charles Quintard and Major George Fairbanks arrived on this Cumberland Plateau mountain to restart what had been the grandest educational dream of the antebellum South.

The original Sewanee cornerstone had been laid in eighteen sixty, but the Civil War erased nearly everything. Union soldiers blew up the cornerstone; the university's founders scattered or died. Quintard called the rebuilding effort Rebel's Rest. He personally raised funds in England, persuading British donors to invest in a ruined institution on a Tennessee mountain. The University of the South opened for students in eighteen sixty-eight and has operated continuously ever since, known today simply as Sewanee, sitting on a thirteen-thousand-acre domain above the Tennessee Valley.