Elmwood Cemetery

Among the buried is the man who ran Memphis. E. H. Crump was mayor from 1910 to 1915 and then sponsored every mayor elected through 1954, holding power by ballot manipulation and patronage. He did not oppose Black voting, and the party often paid the poll taxes the state required, but he gave patronage to hand-picked Black leaders in return for votes. In 1937 only $3,000 of over $300,000 spent on parks went to African Americans, about 40 percent of the population. He died on October 16, 1954, and lies here. Robert Church is buried here too.

What the plaque says

Elmwood Cemetery Elmwood Cemetery was established on August 28, 1852. Buried here are Memphis pioneer families: 14 Confederate generals; victims of the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878; Governors Isham G. Harris and James C. Jones; U.S. Senators Kenneth D. McKellar, Thomas B. Turley, and Stephen Adams, who succeeded Jefferson Davis in the Senate; E.H. Crump, prominent political leader for decades, along with 21 other mayors of Memphis; and Robert Church, the South's first black millionaire

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elmwood Cemetery — steps away
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 0.6 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Sun Studio — 1.1 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• Beale Street — 1.7 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.

More markers nearby

• LeMoyne-Owen College — 0.4 mi
• Hollis Freeman Price, Sr. — 0.5 mi
• The 1960 Memphis Sit-In Movement — 0.5 mi
• Pigeon Roost Road — 0.5 mi