Chattanooga’s Forest Hills Cemetery

Within 20 years of the end of the Civil War, Chattanooga was becoming the Dynamo of Dixie. Entrepreneurs and capital from the North were welcomed to the city. New railroads made the area a transportation hub. Fortunes were made in finance, industry, and tourism. Located at the foot of Lookout Mountain, St. Elmo was Chattanooga’s first suburb. The founder of the then-independent town, A. M. Johnson and other community leaders chartered the Forest Hills Cemetery in the late 1870s. Many Chattanooga-area families obtained sites within the cemetery, now on the National Register of Historic Places. A rarity for the Reconstruction South, these families included a number of African Americans. From the famous to the infamous, from the remembered to the nearly forgotten, Images of America: Chattanooga’s Forest Hills Cemetery highlights a number of Chattanoogans interred in this picturesque historic cemetery.