Cameron Hill

The hill took its name from James Cameron, a Scottish-born painter whom a railroad promoter drew from Nashville to Chattanooga in the 1850s. He bought land here and painted the valley, but the war's devastation left him so disillusioned that by 1865 he had given up painting. He became a Presbyterian minister in California. The hill did not last either. Under the West Side Redevelopment Project, proposed in 1957, its houses and businesses were cleared and over 150 feet of elevation cut away, the fill wanted for freeway construction. The razing came around 1961.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ross's Landing — 0.2 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 0.2 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.
• Walnut Street Bridge — 0.5 mi
  An 1890 truss bridge now open to walkers, and the place where Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 were lynched, the case that led to the Supreme Court's only criminal trial.
• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 0.7 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.

More markers nearby

• Ernest Walter Holmes, Sr. — 0.2 mi
• William "Uncle Bill" Lewis — 0.4 mi
• Carver Memorial Hospital — 0.4 mi
• Chattanooga's First School — 0.4 mi