Old Gray Cemetery

Landscape architect Frederick Douglass drew the plan for a garden cemetery, dedicated in 1852 and named for the poet Thomas Gray at Henrietta Reese's suggestion. The first burial, in 1851, was William Martin, killed in a Fourth of July cannon accident. Unionist Parson Brownlow and secessionist John Hervey Crozier have family plots separated only by a road. Colonel Henry Ashby, a Confederate, lies here too; he was killed in 1868 after a scuffle with Union major Eldad Cicero Camp, also buried here. Mark Twain wrote of an 1882 shootout whose three dead rest here.

What the plaque says

Old Gray Cemetery Old Gray Cemetery, incorporated in 1850, is the resting place of William G. Brownlow, Tennessee governor and U.S. Senator, as well two other U.S. Senators, eight U.S. Congressmen, 26 mayors of Knoxville, and numerous ambassadors, judges, editors, artist, authors, educators, military leader, physicians, and industrialist.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — 1.0 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 1.4 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 15 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 16 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• Old Gray Cemetery — steps away
• Battery Wiltsie — 0.5 mi
• Civil War Hospital — 0.6 mi
• Beauford and Joseph Delaney — 0.6 mi