"Now, therefore, I, Calvin Coolidge, President of the United State of America...do proclaim that said lands...are hereby reserved...as the Meriwether Lewis National Monument"; thus, thirty-one years ago on the 6th of February, the grave site of Captain Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame, was set aside as a Federal park area to honor this great explorer.
The signature of President Coolidge in 1925 charged the Secretary of War with the "supervision, management, and control of this monument". Such action was by no means the first nor the last to secure National recognition for Captain Lewis who met his death October 11, 1809, while in route to Washington to report to President Jefferson. Lewis was then Governor of the Louisiana territory--his famed explorations which carried the American Flag across the continent to the Pacific; took place in 1804-1805. Lewis was buried in a simple grave beside the old Natchez Trace in what was then Maury County, Tennessee. Except for a "post fence" build in 1810, the plot was unmarked until 1848 when the State of Tennessee appropriated $500 for the symbolic marker with the broken top "to denote the violent and untimely end of a bright and glorious career". As additional recognition, a new county bearing Lewis' name was created in 1843 from parts of Hickman, Maury, Wayne and Lawrence counties with Newburg, immediately northeast of the present Monument, designated as the county seat.
With
the removal of the county seat to Hohenwald, in 1897 and the rapid
decay of old Newburg, the monument area fell into disuse. In
the Southern Woman's magazine for June, 1917, the American Novelist
Emerson Hough writes: "It lies forgotten and unknown today,
far away from the paths of commerce. About it lies a forest
broken only here and there by the fields of settlers. there
is no beaten path that leads to the grave of Meriwether
Lewis. His memory is not cherished. The
simple and, more or less,
ignorant people who live about his grave cannot all of them tell who he
was or why he lies here, or why he should have as large a gravestone
over him. They write their own names scrawled on the dingy
shaft, broken at the top, which never important and now practically
abandoned, is the sole tribute to one of America's greatest men."
Meriwether Lewis Monument 1895
In 1923 the Meriwether Lewis Memorial Association was organized with the late John Trotwood Moore of Nashville as president. that organization stimulated interest in the development of the area which led to the establishment of the National Monument in 1925. Extensive travels were made by representatives of the association to urge that each of the fourteen states created, wholly or in part, from the lands discovered by the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific erect a monument or marker within the 300-acre tract which is now Meriwether Lewis National Monument. Additional plans called for the designation of a memorial highway linking the site of Lewis' death with the region of his explorations. Neither plan came into being in spite of continuing efforts.
With the land designated as a Federal area, work was begun on landscaping and the removal of debris and underbrush so that a park-like atmosphere would be created from its former unkempt appearance. A road was opened to the spring to make it available as a picnic site, which purpose it still serves.
On August 11, 1933, in keeping with the consolidations throughout the Nation of all such park areas, Meriwether Lewis National Monument was transferred from the war Department to the National Park service under the Department of the Interior with this shift came a change of policy which halted the extensive clean-up work and allowed much of the area beyond the development limits to return to its natural woodland appearance typical to the 1809 period.
In more recent years the improvement of the road system, construction of the rustic office and museum building, and the further development of the picnicking facilities have increased the public use of this historic site. The near future will bring far greater recognition to the memory of Captain Meriwether Lewis as the completion of the Natchez Trace Parkway, following the same historic route as our early pathfinder at the time of his death, will closely pass his grave.