Monument Hill: Andrew Johnson's Final Resting Place

The hill above Greeneville where Andrew Johnson is buried was his own land, property he purchased in eighteen fifty-two. He called it his thinking place. During the Civil War, when Confederate and Union forces both moved through this corner of Tennessee, soldiers used the hilltop as a signal station, and it became known as Signal Hill. After Johnson's presidency, after the impeachment battle, after everything, he came back here to tend this land and its views.

Johnson died on July thirty-first, eighteen seventy-five, of a stroke while visiting his daughter. He was brought back to Greeneville and buried on August third with Masonic rites, he had been a lifelong member of the order. He was wrapped in an American flag at his own request. Beneath his head lay a copy of the Constitution of the United States, the document he had memorized in his tailor shop decades before.

Three years later, on June fifth, eighteen seventy-eight, a twenty-six-foot marble monument was erected over his grave. The structure was imposing enough that the hill's name changed again: people stopped calling it Signal Hill and began calling it Monument Hill.

Johnson's daughter, Martha Johnson Patterson, eventually willed the burial ground to the federal government in nineteen oh one, stipulating that it be used as a public park in his memory. Congress established the Andrew Johnson National Cemetery in nineteen oh six. When the National Park Service assumed jurisdiction in nineteen forty-two, they halted further burials to preserve the historic character of the grounds. Two of Johnson's sons had been reinterred here, Charles, a military surgeon who died in eighteen sixty-three, and Robert, who died shortly after the family's return from Washington.

The cemetery is small and quiet, overshadowed by the monument. From the crest you can see the same ridgelines Johnson saw. Whatever else he was, the tailor president, the impeached president, the Southern Unionist, he ended here, on his own ground, under a flag and the words he had built his life around.