- Joined
- Feb 23, 2013
- Location
- East Texas
Shy's Hill, scene of the climax of the Battle of Nashville, Dec. 16, 1864.
As with Atlanta and to a lesser extent Chattanooga and other towns and cities, the city and its transportation network have grown to cover and obliterate most of the Civil War-era sites, those related to the battle and otherwise. It seems the identity as Music City has erased all traces of the Southern Heritage so dear to its singer-songwriters! A few obscure places remain, however, for those persistant enough to look and savvy enough to realize what they are.
Fort Negley
The Sally Port, main wartime entrance to Ft. Negley.
One such place is the huge and once-dominating Ft. Negley, built in the years following Union occupation of the State Capital. It was built along with nearby Ft. Casino ( now the location of the city's water cistern! ) on ajacent hills to protect Nashville from an approach from the southeast. The fort was named for brig. Gen. James Negley, at the time commanding the Nashville garrison and later a brigade and division commander in the Army of the Cumberland, and grew to cover four acres measuring some 600' X 300' in size. Negley was built mostly by contrabands, slaves, and even freemen dragooned for the job by engineer/General James St. Clair Morton, termed the Vandal general by citizens whose homes he cavalierly ordered destroyed to provide building materials and to clear fields of fire for the fort's guns.
View from inside the fort showing the hills to the south occuppied by Hood's army during the Battle of Nashville.
Ft. Negley played no active role in the Dec. 15 - 16, 1864, battle, apart from shelling the Confederate lines with its 30-pounder Parrott at the beginning of the action. It remained in use into the early days of Reconstruction, however, as a symbol of Union power. Like many other such installations, Negley fell into decay and disuse following the war, occuppied by vagrants and stripped for building materials. It was largely forgotten until the 1930's and became a project for the Works Progress Administration or WPA. Because of its stone foundations, it had survived reasonably well and was somewhat restored to its wartime appearance to serve as a city park.
Outline of the stone foundations, largely rebuilt in the 1930's by the WPA.
Unfortunately, by the time I first visited it in 1987, it had again fallen into neglect and decay; as I told people, it resembled far more a series of long-abandoned Japanese pillboxes on some forgotten Pacific jungle island than it did any Civil War fort! Once again it appears that Ft. Negley is being protected by the city of Nashville and even boasts its own Visitor Center. As you can see, however, it's not being maintained or mowed as befits one of the few remaining sites of Civil War Nashville.