Johnsonville State Historic Park

Johnsonville was built to feed an army. After the Union took Nashville, its supply lines up the Cumberland River and the Louisville and Nashville Railroad proved unreliable, so in March 1864 the army began a depot on the Tennessee River, named for Military Governor Andrew Johnson. By May there was a 90-acre depot with docks and warehouses, linked to Nashville by a 78-mile military railroad. Formerly enslaved men were part of the workforce that built that railroad, and the garrison included United States Colored Troops. The park's manager says some of the builders later joined the 100th United States Colored Infantry to defend what they had built.

On November 4, 1864, Confederate artillery on the river's west bank shelled the depot, and millions of dollars in supplies were lost. Johnsonville lived on as a railroad town after a bridge was finished in 1867, and the Freedmen's Bureau ran a school for African American students. In 1944 Kentucky Dam backed Kentucky Lake over most of the town, and people moved to New Johnsonville, incorporated in 1949. In winter, low water shows old railroad pilings at the park's edge.

The park, which opened in 1971, keeps the earthworks of Fort Johnson, reproduction soldier huts, a rail bed and a turntable, with about eight miles of trails. One loop runs to an African American cemetery. The park manager has said the park's Black cemeteries were long overgrown and forgotten, and unmarked graves in the African Methodist Cemetery were marked in 2021. The manager has also named this stretch of river as a water route of the Cherokee removal.