On the morning of October 3, a small group of walkers will gather at the gates of Greenwood Cemetery on Greenwood Avenue, and for about an hour they will do something that would have struck a late-nineteenth-century Clarksvillian as perfectly ordinary: they will stroll the grounds, admire the monuments, and talk about the people buried there.
That is the premise of the Historic Greenwood Cemetery Walking Tours, a program of the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center. The museum runs the tours on October 3, 17, and 31, 2026, each beginning promptly at 10:00 a.m. and lasting roughly an hour. Tickets are $20 for non-members and $15 for museum members, and they must be bought in advance — the museum does not sell same-day tickets and does not accept drop-ins, because space is limited. The tour is a walk, not a seated lecture, so participants should come ready to be on their feet along the cemetery's winding paths.
What they will be walking through is not merely a graveyard but a document of a particular moment in the city's history. Greenwood opened during one of Clarksville's more prosperous eras. In the years after the Civil War, the town's economy was driven by the tobacco trade, and a number of wealthy families found themselves wanting a bright new place to lay their loved ones to rest. The older cemeteries and churchyards in the middle of town were landlocked — hemmed in by development and impossible to expand. The concept of Greenwood was born in 1872, and by 1873 the cemetery was soliciting burial plots. It quickly became the place to be buried.
The idea behind it belonged to a broader national movement. In the mid-nineteenth century, American cities began running out of room in their churchyards, and a new kind of burial ground — the rural cemetery, or garden cemetery — took hold, modeled on landscaped parks rather than cramped plots behind a church. Greenwood was Clarksville's answer to that impulse. At roughly 125 acres, it has the appearance of a park, with rolling hills and trees, exactly the rural garden setting that was fashionable at the time. The cemetery also became a setting for notable and wealthy citizens to be immortalized with elaborate tombstones and mausoleums, and it remains a well-preserved example of the mortuary symbolism that was popular in the nineteenth century.
It was, in its early decades, a social destination as much as a burial ground. The Clarksville trolley made frequent stops at Greenwood so that residents could stroll and admire the scenery. Ladies would meet friends there to picnic, in part because downtown Clarksville was viewed as rough, dirty, and not the safest place to visit. The cemetery opened to considerable fanfare, and for a time it functioned as one of the city's pleasant public grounds.
The stories the guides tell are where the tour earns its keep. Take Cave Johnson, the politician who is often described as Greenwood's oldest resident — except that he was not buried there at all, at least not at first. Johnson died in 1866, years before the cemetery opened. His son, Polk Grundy Johnson, was one of the first Clarksville residents to purchase a plot when Greenwood's land became available, and he had his father reinterred in the new cemetery. Cave Johnson's career had been substantial: a Democratic congressman from Tennessee, he served as United States Postmaster General under President James K. Polk. He had also, decades earlier, been part of a volunteer company whose members elected him captain and offered their services to Andrew Jackson, who declined them and told the young men they would serve the country better by staying in school. Johnson obeyed — though, as the Postal Service's own history notes, not for long.
Greenwood also holds Frank Sutton, the actor best remembered as Gunnery Sergeant Vince Carter on the CBS television series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Sutton was born in Clarksville in 1923, developed an interest in acting as a boy, served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and died in 1974 in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the age of fifty. He is buried in the family plot at Greenwood. A statue of Sergeant Carter was unveiled in downtown Clarksville in 2017, a reminder that the cemetery's residents are not only nineteenth-century figures.
And there is Gustavus A. Henry, the Clarksville attorney and Whig who in 1840 canvassed Tennessee for William Henry Harrison and three years later ran for Congress against the popular incumbent Cave Johnson — losing by 228 votes. Henry is buried at Greenwood as well. The two men, rivals in life, share the same ground.
The museum that runs the tours has its own place in this story. The Customs House Museum & Cultural Center occupies a distinctly shaped building at 200 South Second Street in downtown Clarksville, constructed in 1898 as a U.S. Post Office and Customs House — built, as local histories note, to accommodate the booming tobacco export industry and the large volume of foreign mail that came with it. The building passed through several owners before becoming a cultural and historical institution for Clarksville and Montgomery County in 1984. A 1996 expansion more than doubled its space for exhibits and events. It is, by its own account, the state's second-largest general-interest museum, with more than 35,000 square feet of exhibit space.
The cemetery tours have long been part of the museum's tradition, and the format has stayed fairly consistent over the years: a one-hour guided walk highlighting the notable figures laid to rest at Greenwood, followed in some years by an optional curator's talk on objects from the museum's collection. The 2026 tours keep the walking portion at about an hour, beginning at 10:00 a.m.
For anyone who has driven past the stone gates on Greenwood Avenue without stopping, the tour is a chance to learn what the place actually is: not a relic but an active burial ground, one of Clarksville's oldest, still receiving the dead while holding the earlier generations who shaped the city. The museum's own framing is modest — a walk through the past, stories that remain part of the community today. But the subtext is sharper. Greenwood exists because a prosperous post-Civil War town decided its dead deserved a park, and because the families who could afford elaborate monuments wanted to be remembered in stone. An hour among those monuments is an hour spent reading the city's own account of itself.
Advance registration is required through the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center, and space is limited. The cemetery is at 976 Greenwood Avenue, Clarksville, Tennessee 37040.