A rendering of the proposed Cloud Hill development that has been called off
As Stephen Elliott reported last week for the Scene, the Cloud Hill Development and all potential redevelopment of the Greer Stadium portion of Fort Negley Park is off the table thanks to the results of the Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research group’s survey of the area.
The 144 page survey is available online, but I’m planning on hitting some of the highlights for you in the coming days.
Let’s start with the most important thing first: No, they did not find the bodies of the workers who built the fortifications around town, including Fort Negley.
You might hear that they did, because that’s the easiest way to explain why everything that had been planned for that area has now been dropped like a hot potato, but that’s not what has happened.
Instead, imagine this: You ask your husband, “Where are all the socks we bought Junior for Christmas?” and he says, “After I washed them, I dumped them on his bed, so he could put them away.” So, you go into Junior’s room and you see a pile of clean laundry on his bed that reaches the ceiling. The kid is 16 and you are not going to fold his laundry for him any more, dammit. But are those socks in the pile? Or were they put away before the pile formed?
You know your husband put them on Junior’s bed. You know if you strategically reach into the pile in five places, you might be able to grab and see if you can come up with a sock without toppling the pile on top of you. So, say you do that and you don’t come up with a sock, but you come up with a t-shirt you know was in the laundry at the same time as the socks.
What’s that tell you? It’s likely that the socks are still in there, you just didn’t happen to hit one.
This is pretty much what the archaeologists found — not piles of bodies, but a lot of evidence that the layers of dirt that would contain bodies were still there under the Works Progress Administration fill and the ball field and the parking lots, and much of it hadn’t been disturbed in the subsequent activities on the site.
A large part of the survey is devoted to providing the historical context that would make any discoveries they made make sense. And it’s in this part that the massive scope of the potential headache of developing this area becomes obvious.
William R. Cornelius, a local Nashville undertaker, was commissioned by the federal government to serve as the Union’s undertaker for the region. In total, Cornelius buried 13,561 federal soldiers and government employees during the Union occupation of Nashville. In addition, he interred 8,000 Confederate soldiers and 10,000 contrabands and refugees.[...]
Between October 1867 and January 1868, the remains of 8,592 individuals in the Due West and South West cemeteries [the additions that had been made to the city cemetery for the purpose of holding all these dead bodies] were exhumed and reinterred in the Nashville National Cemetery. It appears that a number of graves were left behind, and an 1867 newspaper article describes a dozen “lonely, sunken graves, probably of as many Confederate soldiers.” (pages 37-38)
So, just to make the math problem here clear: Cornelius buried upwards of 32,000 people at the bottom of St. Cloud Hill. We know 8,592 Union soldiers came out of the ground. We know that Mt. Olivet has 1,500 Confederate soldiers in their Confederate Circle. But that barely brings us to a third of the people we know Cornelius put in that dirt. It doesn’t even account for all of the soldiers.
And then there’s the 10,000. The archaeology report cites first-hand observations of trenches being opened up and thirty bodies a day just being dumped into them. Ten thousand people there somewhere, people who had come to Nashville hoping for safety. Dying instead.
Obviously, anyone who died building the fortifications would also be there, since this is where Cornelius was burying people, but how could we know which people were workers and which were just the unfortunate dead?
The area the archaeologies surveyed was a small, crescent moon right at the base of the hill, that encompassed the ball field and the parking lots — the places the city was looking to develop — but they did not, since it was outside the scope of their assignment, look everywhere that Cornelius put bodies.
Using official descriptions and eye-witness accounts, it seems possible that Cornelius was digging in a crescent that reached past Chestnut.
So, we, as a city, need to be aware that it’s not just the Fort Negley workers who are missing and it’s not just within the boundaries of the park or the survey where they might be found.
But the survey shows us that there are still places to look, if we want to.
