Clifton, TN

At the 2020 census, Clifton was a Wayne County city of 2,651 people perched above the Tennessee River in a town built around a landing. Clifton incorporated in 1854 after planters from Maury County pushed the Columbia Central Turnpike seventy miles to the river, creating a route for cotton and other goods when the Duck River could no longer carry them. The town’s name comes from the high cliff above the water. By the Civil War, steamboats crowded the port, and the river crossing made Clifton a military prize.

Clifton was badly damaged during the war, but it rebuilt as a trade and production center shipping iron, leather, staves, dried fruit, lumber, feathers, grain, cotton, and peanuts. The Water Street Historic District keeps that river economy visible in its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century homes. Clifton also runs through the life of writer T. S. Stribling, whose house is now a museum; he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Store in 1933. A marina, the riverfront, and the old port streets tell the same story from different angles: Clifton grew because the Tennessee River made a landing here matter.