Downtown Clarksville is a compact historic district of 19th-century brick commercial and residential buildings clustered on the bluffs above the Cumberland River. The core is roughly ten blocks — Main Street, Franklin Street, and the streets connecting them — with the Customs House Museum at one end and the Riverwalk at the other.
The district was badly burned in 1862 during the Civil War (Confederate forces set fire to tobacco warehouses to prevent their capture by Union troops) and rebuilt in the 1870s and 1880s. That post-war rebuilding gives downtown a coherent Victorian character, with Italianate and Second Empire commercial facades lining the main streets. The district has been revitalising since the 2000s, with independent restaurants, galleries, and small shops taking over storefronts that were empty for decades.