God’s Wisdom Revealed

It may be surprising, but the railroad tunnel in Cowan made Sewanee possible. Samuel Tracy of New York purchased 50,000 acres of land on top of the Cumberland Plateau in the early 1850s as he helped establish Sewanee Mining Company. Tracy City bears his name. At the same time, the Episcopal Church was looking for a suitable location for a university, a place where “God may be glorified and the happiness of man advanced” (Bishop Leonidas Polk, 1860). When Tracy realized that some of his land was not suitable for coal mining, he donated 5,000 acres to the Episcopal Church on September 23, 1858. The rest is history.