Overton Park Historic District (Additional Documentation)

About this property

Overton Park is a 342-acre (138 ha) public park in Midtown, Memphis, Tennessee. The park grounds contain the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis Zoo, a 9-hole golf course, the Memphis College of Art, Rainbow Lake, Veterans Plaza, the Greensward, and other features. The park was established in 1906 and contains the Old Forest Arboretum of Overton Park, one of the few remaining old growth forests in Tennessee. The property, once known locally as Lea's Woods, was purchased by Memphis on November 14, 1901, for $110,000 (equivalent to $4,257,000 in 2025); it was located along the city's eastern and northern boundary at that time. Overton Park was designed by landscape architect George Kessler as part of a comprehensive plan that also included Riverside Park (later M.L. King Riverside Park) and the Memphis Parkway System. The planning began in 1901, and Overton Park was established in 1906. The park is named in honor of John Overton, a co-founder of Memphis. Overton's name was selected in a competition to name the new park conducted by the Evening Scimitar, a local newspaper; the three choices in the voting were Memphis founding fathers Andrew Jackson, Overton, and James Winchester. The official naming occurred on July 25, 1902. In the 1960s and 1970s Overton Park was the subject of controversy when 26 of its 342 acres (138 ha) were slated by highway planners to be demolished to build Interstate 40 through the park to make it easier for suburban commuters to get to downtown. A small number of residents of midtown formed a group known as Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, and challenged the plan in court. Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court ruled in their favor in the landmark case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe. Nevertheless, the City of Memphis and Tennessee Department of Transportation continued to propose a number of alternatives for routing Interstate 40 through Overton Park, including building the highway in a tunnel, or in a deep trench. In 1978, Citizens to Preserve Overton Park successfully nominated the park to the National Register of Historic Places, thus guaranteeing that Federal funding could not be used for projects that damaged the park's historic integrity without approval from the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Memphis Commercial Appeal called the National Registration the "final nail in the coffin" of efforts to route Interstate 40 through Overton Park. Beginning in June 1974, the road system within the interior of Overton Park was gradually closed to motorized vehicles on weekends and holidays, which were called "People's Days". Although initially there were some objections, the new policy gained popularity, and the closures were made permanent on April 13, 1987, except for official vehicles.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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