The graveyard was used for burials for nearly sixty years, its most active period being during the Epidemic of 1838, in which hundreds of Knoxvillians died from an unidentified illness.

[1] In 1790, after his fort was chosen as the capital for the newly created Southwest Territory, James White asked his son-in-law, surveyor Charles McClung, to lay out a new town, named "Knoxville" after Secretary of War Henry Knox.

Ochs, then a young teenager working after hours as a "printer's devil" for the Knoxville Chronicle, feared walking past the graveyard at night, as many locals believed it to be haunted.

Rather than leave work after his shift (which ended close to midnight), Ochs stayed until daylight, spending the extra time learning the typesetting and printing trades.

The First Presbyterian Church Graveyard resembles a traditional early Anglo-American cemetery,[1] with graves crowded together and marked by relatively simple headstones.