Nashville City Cemetery, opened in 1820 as the city's first public burial ground, is one of the oldest continuously operating cemeteries in Tennessee, and its weathered limestone tablets lie ahead of you. The cemetery is an open archive of Nashville's first century: generals, governors, mayors, and ordinary residents are buried here, their markers tracing the city's growth from frontier outpost to antebellum commercial center. Among the notable burials is James Robertson, one of the founders of Fort Nashborough in 1779, considered the father of Nashville.
Markers survive for veterans of the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. The cemetery also holds thousands of residents whose names are not famous — merchants, craftsmen, domestic workers, and enslaved people buried in designated sections with minimal or no individual markers. The Friends of Nashville City Cemetery, a volunteer organization, has spent decades researching and restoring the grounds, which fell into serious disrepair through the mid-twentieth century.
In the oldest sections, where weathered limestone tablets carry Federal-era lettering, you are reading the handwriting of early Nashville's stone carvers — the people who recorded who mattered enough to be remembered by name.