In the most exciting bit of Nashville History News to develop since I discovered the site of the Jackson/Dickinson duel through study, travel and asking a local, Stephen Elliott over at our sister publication the Nashville Post is reporting on a petition filed by AJ Capital to remove a couple of bodies they found while digging their foundation. AJ wants to put those remains in the Nashville City Cemetery. They’re digging this foundation on the land between the cemetery and Chestnut Street.
As Stephen reports:
Archaeological monitors hired by AJ Capital identified human skeletal remains and fragments of wood, likely from associated coffins, on both May 16 and June 7, according to a filing by Kelly Hockersmith, one of the archaeologists hired by the developer. The remains were located between 14 and 18 feet beneath ground level while digging for foundation work was underway.
Hockersmith determined that the remains are estimated to date to the early 19th century and are not of Native American origin.
I emailed Hockersmith and asked how she determined that the remains were from the early 19th century and not the mid-19th, when much of that area was a giant graveyard for Civil War soldiers. As of this writing, she has not replied.
However, if I were AJ Capital and I found bones on my worksite, I would sure want them to be from civilians and not from soldiers the Army might have an interest in. Otherwise, who knows what kind of red tape might be involved with moving them?
Which brings me to Bob’s Hole.
There are three prevailing stories about Bob’s Hole, all with enough similarities that AJ Capital should be worried about finding more remains.
The one I heard, back when I was writing about Fort Negley, is that after all the Union remains had been removed to the National Cemetery up in Madison, a forlorn, dilapidated cow pasture full of poorly marked Confederate graves stood at the corner of Fourth and Chestnut. There was talk of moving them out to the Confederate Circle at Mount Olivet Cemetery, but before that could happen, a giant sinkhole opened up and swallowed all of the Confederate graves. Kind of like the sinkhole that opened up under the National Corvette Museum in 2014. In this story, Bob was the guy they tied a rope around and dangled into the hole to see if he could find bottom and recover the caskets. Bob declared the hole had no bottom that he could see. The Confederates were left down there.
There are two main problems with this version. One is that the United Daughters of the Confederacy has had a long and active history here in Nashville. If there was some sinkhole full of the Confederate dead in South Nashville, there would be three generations of historical markers stacked up beside it. The other — probably more damning — indictment of this story is that the Decatur rail depot went up on the site almost immediately after the war, and by the mid-1870s, there was a huge warehouse and a cotton compress to go along with the depot. It would be quite a feat of engineering to suspend all that over a bottomless hole. And yet those buildings went up with little notice in the local papers and no notice in the national and international papers — almost as if they were ordinary buildings placed on regular ground.
The second version of the story is what brought Army Capt. G. Maury Cralle to Nashville in 1911 to see if Union remains could be recovered. This story appeared in the Oct. 8, 1911, Nashville Tennessean and is relayed by an ex-city councilman, Charles A. Marlin, who was “the recognized authority on Nashville history.” Judging by the news, he was also the person who brought Captain Cralle to town. Here’s Marlin’s story:
The first discovery of this great system of underground passageways, according to Mr. Marlin, was during the war, about 1862. "Bob," an old negro slave, was digging a grave for a Federal soldier in the southern part of the cemetery. While at work and with no previous warning the bottom of this grave fell out and "Bob" came near losing his life. The site was at once abandoned, but the hole was not filled up. A short time after this Bob himself died, and the soldiers, not being so particular about an old slave as they were of their messmate, put some planks across the gaping pit and buried the old negro in the grave of his own digging.
"A few weeks after his burial," said Mr. Marlin, "a big freshet came and the bottom again fell out of Bob's grave. Bob's body and the bodies of twenty-nine Federal soldiers who had been buried in shallow graves were washed into the opening together and no trace of them was ever seen again. It is supposed that Bob's bones and the bones of those brave men have long since intermingled and been washed into the muddy waters of the Cumberland. The soldiers are supposed to have died at Howard's school which was used as a Federal hospital from 1862 to 1865.
"In those days the city cemetery comprised all of the territory between Oak and Chestnut streets, but toward the close of the war the burying ground was cut down on the south side and Burr's compress placed on a part of the site, while the Tennessee & Alabama or the Old Decatur road was put on the other part. Burr's compress burned down in the eighties, but the old depot still stands and is now used by the Nashville Warehouse and Elevator Co."
We know that Black Nashvillians and people who had fled into town from their enslavers were conscripted into service to fortify the city in 1862. If Bob was a real person, Bob was one of those people. It also suggests that Nashville had a civic memory of throwing the workers who died in a hole on site. But would Bob have been buried with “twenty-nine Federal soldiers” near enough to him that they would have washed down the hole with him? In 1862? I kind of don’t think so. That’s assuming a lot less racism in white Union soldiers than I feel comfortable granting. Still, if you had pulled two sets of human remains out of the ground there, you might be sweating about the possibility of the other two dozen or so.
The bigger problem with this story is spelled out by John Allyn in a post he made a decade ago on the Battle of Nashville Trust website: "Later burials — which would include casualties from the Battle of Nashville — were in a separate cemetery created and maintained by the Federal government. The U.S. Government Burial Ground (with 8,593 burials) extended south from the City Cemetery between Fourth Avenue South (Cherry Street) and the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad (now CSX) to the former N & C depot (located roughly at the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue South and Chestnut Street) and possibly picked up again across Chestnut Street.” If Bob died in 1862, he and the 30 Federal troops who might have been with him would not have been buried near Bob’s Hole, because the Army didn’t start using the extended burial grounds until later in the war. You’d think Captain Cralle would have known that, but maybe he did and just wanted a trip to Nashville anyway.
But the paper has one more version of the story, told to them by a man who had buried people in that location during the war and who had worked for the cemetery on and off for the rest of his life — William T. Perry, who lived at 1061 Second Ave. S., just two blocks from the cemetery:
“While the Yanks had possession of Nashville," said Mr. Perry, talking slowly and as though the occurrence was only yesterday, "we were not allowed to bury any soldier in the city cemetery unless we had his name and the number of his regiment. So we put Bob (we gave him that name) in the tool house to await identification. Though the body was kept in this tool house for three or four weeks it did not decompose but seemed to dry up or petrify, no smell at all being perceptible. The boys used to sit on Bob's coffin and eat their noon lunches, talking to the corpse as they did so, asking Bob to have some of this or that, while some of the other fellows would talk back for him. Finally, not learning who he was and having nothing else to do with him, we buried Bob in a shallow grave in the southern part of the cemetery. William Davis, now dead, dug the grave."
"A short time afterward, a big freshet came and the first thing we knew the water had covered Bob's grave and was swirling round and round like a whirlpool. The suction became greater and greater until there was a big hole in the center of the pool and the roar of the water could be heard for several yards. Without a moment's warning the whole thing, Bob and all, fell in. This place has since been called Bob's Hole, and I have no doubt at all but that it is the entrance to numerous caves which run under Nashville.”
This, I believe, is probably the true story. It just sounds so gross and hilarious and like something that would happen during wartime, that young men would make a mascot out of a mummy and eat lunch with it and talk to it.
The coolest part of all this, though, is that a picture from the Civil War that backs this up, taken by George Barnard in the spring of 1864 at Fort Negley. God bless the detail in those old albumen prints. If you look at the TIFF, you can see all the cemeteries in the middle distance. (Fair warning, it’s over a gig in size — find some detailed screenshots below.) Starting in the middle left, you can see the front entrance to the city cemetery, roughly where Oak and Fourth intersect now. Keep coming right until you see a lone man facing right with a huge rifle over his shoulder. The headstones closest to us as the viewers, the ones on this side of the train tracks, inside the stone fence are in the Catholic cemetery. On the other side of the tracks is more of the city cemetery. Keep going right.
You’ll see a pretty dramatic drop in the city cemetery and then, closer to us, outside the fence of the cemetery, you can see the soldiers’ graves. There look to be quite a few in the city cemetery just on the other side of the fence too.
This brings us to the corner of Fourth and Chestnut. The brick building in the background, with the three windows, is at that corner. In front of that, at the bottom of the hill the cemetery sits on, is the big empty field where AJ Capital is finding bodies.
What’s curious is that there aren’t any grave markers there. That’s a large open area right by the train tracks and near many hospitals. Why wouldn’t they put remains there? We heard the stories, and now I think we can see why. I thought the light-gray bit coming down from Chestnut to the corner of the cemeteries and the front of the one train was a path at first. But y’all, the more I study it, the more I think it’s water. It’s spring in the picture. We tend to have wet springs. If we imagine Bob’s Hole less as a dramatic, bottomless pit and more as a ground collapse that opened into a cave — which matches William Perry’s description — then what happens is easy enough to see. It’s like a bathtub. If the water coming into that low point is a trickle, it flows into Bob’s Hole no problem. You could bury someone like poor anonymous Bob in that good bottom soil and think all was well. But when too much water flows into the “tub,” Bob’s Hole can’t handle it and it backs up and saturates the ground and up pops stuff you thought was buried. Then, something gives way inside the cave, and just like water down the drain, a giant whirlpool starts and sucks Bob down with all the water.
Since the cemetery did formerly stretch all the way to Chestnut and then was shrunk down to its current size sometime before the war, I think we can guess that Bob was not the first decedent to be buried in that area and then washed away. It must have happened frequently enough that they stopped using that part of the cemetery.
Could either set of bones that popped back up be the remains of poor anonymous Bob? Just going by union rules — last one in is first one out — it seems plausible. And it seems possible that the remains could predate the war, as AJ Capital’s archaeologist states. But if there’s a chance these are the remains of Civil War soldiers, it would be nice to figure that out and move them up to Madison with their comrades.
But Nashville, if we’ve found Bob and he is reinterred in the city cemetery still somehow unknown except by the nickname we gave him, then by God, let’s do right by him. Let’s go have our lunch while sitting on him, and we can tell him stories about what’s happened since we last saw him. And he can quietly ponder how he came to be such a part of the city’s history. If this is Bob, let me be the first to say, “Welcome back.”
