Our traveler need do little more than cross the great bridge at Knoxville to find quarries of marble; and if he goes up and down for a few miles, he will see rich deposits of this stone. It is prized because it shows many colors,--cream, yellow, brown, red, pink, and blue. The colors often run into each other in curious and fantastic ways, and the slabs and blocks when polished are beautiful indeed. These marbles have been used to adorn some of the finest buildings in America, including the National Capitol. [Illustration: FIG. 67. ON THE CAMPUS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE] Around Knoxville are fine farms also, just as we find them about Harrisburg, Hagerstown, Winchester, and almost everywhere else in the Great Valley. Our view (Fig. 52) is taken near Knoxville and shows sloping fields always ready to bear good crops. The soils have been made by the wasting of the top parts of these same beds of marble and of other rocks found along with it. In Knoxville, on the edge of the city, is the University of Tennessee, with many buildings upon its campus. It is an excellent school and an old one as well, having been founded in 1794. It was first named Blount College, from one of the prominent public men of the valley at that time, and is now one of the foremost schools of the South. Only seven years before that date two old Revolutionary soldiers rode through the woods and picked out these lands, which were given to them as a reward for their service in the war. Here they built as a defense against the savages a wooden fort, with log cabins at the corners and a stockade with a stout barred gate. Such a fort was greatly needed in those days whenever a new settlement was made. After the two soldiers had planted corn they went back to North Carolina to bring their families over the mountains. This was the beginning of Knoxville, which grew up around the fort and soon spread over the hills and down to the river. The settlement was named in honor of Henry Knox, who was an able general in the Revolution and a good friend of George Washington. Now the railroads reach out in every direction. They bring in the iron ore and the limestones of the valley. They also run up into the Cumberland Gap, and to Harriman, Tennessee, and bring back stores of coal, thus making Knoxville a place for working iron. To the east the Southern Railroad leads up the French Broad (Fig. 61) through deep gorges into the heart of the Great Smokies at Asheville, and across the Blue Ridge to the lowlands of North Carolina. All this is very different from the samp mortars and the puncheon floors of early times, but the pioneers had a keen eye for the soil and the waters and the trees, and it is these which have helped to make the valley rich to-day. [Illustration: FIG. 68. MARBLE QUARRY NEAR KNOXVILLE]