When I was a child, Clarksville was still called “The Queen City of the Cumberland” because it was such an important market for corn, flour, cotton and particularly burley tobacco. Large tobacco warehouses stood on the hillside beside the Cumberland River, navigable to Clarksville 12 months of the year. Conversely, during low water, the largest steamboats could not reach Nashville because the water at Harpeth shoals was often only three feet deep.
I have always had an interest in Clarksville and Montgomery County because of ancestral connections there. In 1793, a direct ancestor of mine, Maj. Evan Shelby, a brother of Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky, lived on the Red River near Clarksville. That year, he and others were murdered by Native Americans as they fled their homes for Fort Nashboro.
In 1837, my great grandfather, Jesse Ely, was born in Clarksville. He grew up there, where he and his family were members of the Baptist Church. During the Civil War, Jesse was a private in the Confederate Army. In 1863, he was captured by Union soldiers on Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and sent by steamboat to Rock Island Prison in Illinois on the Mississippi River. He was confined there until the end of the war, when he moved to Nashville, dying there in 1897.
In 1940, when I was six years old, Clarksville was a town of 11,831 people, who, in the summertime, enjoyed watching Clarksville’s Class A Kitty League baseball team (Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee) play the Evansville Aces, the Paducah Indians, the Jackson Suns and others. On Sundays, Montgomery County citizens enjoyed having picnics and dancing in the mouth of Dunbar Cave which Roy Acuff owned. Dunbar Cave is now a state park.
In 1940, Jackson, then the fifth largest city in the state, was more than twice the size of Clarksville with 24,332 citizens. Chattanooga, the third largest city in the state, was more than ten times the size of Clarksville with 128,163 people. It advertised itself as “The Dynamo of Dixie.”
After World War II, Clarksville grew rapidly with its industrial base expanding with communication and technology industries. Fort Campbell, which is more in Tennessee than it is in Kentucky, has greatly contributed to Clarksville rapid growth — 55% of the soldiers there live off base. Twenty-four percent of the students in Montgomery County today are military dependents. In recent years, multiple companies have announced plans for massive investments in Clarksville that have promised to bring over 3,500 jobs in the next three to five years. Clarksville has successfully recruited high-tech industries, many of which are in an industrial park immediately off I-24. Downtown, the Nashville Predators and Clarksville have teamed up to build a multi-purpose recreational building. Naturally, it has an ice rink and is also the home of the Austin Peay Lady Govs basketball team. A block away, on North First Street, Clarksville based Milan Industries announced in 2024 that they will build an eight-story mixed use residential and retail building with a gym, club room and roof-top pool overlooking the river.
Nearby, on Commerce Street, is the Queen Ann-style Custom House Museum and Cultural Center, the second largest general purpose museum in the state. A few blocks from there, on College Street, fast-growing Austin Peay State University has an enrollment of approximately 10,000. In 2024, Clarksville’s population was 186,449, almost identical to Chattanooga’s population of 186,612. When the 2030 U.S. Census is taken, Clarksville will almost certainly be the fourth largest city in the state, followed by Chattanooga or fast-growing Murfreesboro, whose 2024 population was 162,190.