History
By the 1840s, the garden cemetery movement, driven largely by the fame of Paris's Père Lachaise Cemetery, had gained popularity in France, England, and the United States, as planners in various large cities began building larger, more elaborate cemeteries in their respective cities' outskirts and suburbs. During this period, Knoxville's leaders sought such a cemetery for Knoxville, as many had incorrectly believed the First Presbyterian Church Cemetery (near the center of town) had caused a deadly epidemic in 1838. In February 1850, a board of trustees, led by East Tennessee University president William B. Reese, was appointed to buy land and sell lots for a new cemetery.
The site of Old Gray Cemetery was previously pastureland located just outside Knoxville's northwestern city limits. Only a mile from the city's downtown area, it was considered ideal for a suburban cemetery. The first land for the cemetery was purchased in December 1849, and landscape architect Frederick Douglass was hired to come up with a groundplan. At the suggestion of Reese's wife, Henrietta, the cemetery was named after English poet Thomas Gray, author of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
The cemetery was dedicated on June 1, 1852, with the sale of the first 40 grave lots. The first burial had, however, occurred on July 15 of the previous year, after a local man named William Martin died of wounds from a cannon explosion during the city's Fourth-of-July celebration. Martin's grave was not marked, but a small marble memorial in the northwest section of the cemetery recalls the incident.
Many of the cemetery's early burials were victims of Knoxville's 1854 cholera epidemic. The cemetery also contains several dozen victims of the New Market train wreck of 1904. In 1912, the cemetery witnessed one of the largest funeral processions ever conducted in the South, when some 40,000 mourners attended the burial of former Tennessee governor Robert "Fiddlin' Bob" Taylor (Taylor's grave has since been moved to Johnson City.)
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