Old Gray Cemetery

Since the Civil War, the thirteen-acre Old Gray Cemetery has been the final resting place for Union and Confederate veterans. During the conflict, control of Knoxville shifted from Confederate to Union forces, so both sides are represented there. Established in 1850, the cemetery reflects the Rural Cemetery Movement that swept the urban South in the decade before the war. There are no political divisions within Old Gray. Tennessee’s Reconstruction-era governor William G. “Parson” Brownlow lies buried just across the way from Henry M. Ashby, one of the Confederacy’s youngest colonels. William Richard Caswell, a brigadier general in the Provisional Army of Tennessee, was murdered at his Knox County home in 1862. U.S. Congressman Leonidas C. Houk organized the 1st Tennessee Infantry (USA), while U.S. Congressman Horace Maynard was one of the leaders of the 1861 Unionist Convention at Greenville. Ellen Renshaw House Fletcher called herself “a very violent rebel” and kept an invaluable diary of life in Knoxville during the Civil War. The Horne Monument features an almost life-sized sculpture of a Confederate soldier marking the graves of William A. Horne and his brother John F. Horne. Union cavalrymen known as Gen. George Stoneman’s “Cossacks,” members of the “Immortal Six Hundred,” Confederate nurse Jennie Gammon, who was shot during the Battle of Fort Sanders, and Union caregiver Maggie S. P. Haynes, matron of the Union army’s Asylum General Hospital, now rest there together. In September 1862, Sgt. Samuel Bell Palmer of Mabry’s Artillery wrote that camp was moved to a grove opposite Gray Cemetery, where the battery increased to four guns and new recruits were drilled for several weeks. The “Immortal Six Hundred” were Confederate officers confined on Morris Island near Charleston, South Carolina; in October 1864 they were placed in the line of fire from Confederate guns at Fort Sumter in retaliation for the exposure of six hundred Union officers in Charleston to Federal artillery fire, and the standoff ended when a yellow fever epidemic forced Confederate authorities to remove the Federal prisoners from the city.

Knoxville, Tennessee · United States