On page 40 of the Greer Stadium archaeology report, there’s this interesting bit:
By 1869, squatters had taken up residence in the former government buildings on St. Cloud Hill, and according to a newspaper article, “the most unseemly carousals are indulged in, and numerous shots are fired off day and night.” The hill was reputed as a hideout for thieves and outlaws, who allegedly escaped police through the old tunnel that connected Fort Negley with the McNairy vault in the City Cemetery.
On page 44 we learn:
...a group of laborers investigated the existence of a tunnel that allegedly once connected Fort Negley with a vault in the City Cemetery. While they did not definitively locate the tunnel, they identified a trap door within the fort and a cemetery vault with a hollow-sounding wall that may be the locations of the tunnel’s entrances.
So, this is awesome. But there are a lot — a lot — of reasons to be skeptical of it. Just for starters, this would mean the presence of a shaft going down from the fort to an elevation of, six, maybe 10 feet under the city cemetery? That has never been detected while we were burying more people in the cemetery, never stumbled across by the railroad?
Also, there are approximately 20 McNairys in the city cemetery, most of whom died in the 1850s. The oldest McNairy burial in the cemetery appears to be Judge John McNairy who has an elaborate gravestone near the Robertsons. He died in 1837.
At that point in the cemetery, you may still have been able to dig a tunnel from there, across the field and up inside St. Cloud Hill (or vice versa) but why would you want to? At that time St. Cloud Hill was just a hill in a field. The cemetery was way on the outskirts of town. You didn’t really need to sneak from either place to either place. No one was out there to see you. If, for some reason, you needed to be stealthy, you could have just crouched down a little.
Second, we’re supposed to believe that the WPA workers opened a vault but didn’t open a trap door? Going to hang out with dead bodies was less spooky than pulling open a small piece of wood (or metal)? I’m not buying it.
But there are some things to suggest this story isn’t complete hogwash. One is that there are still old Nashvillians who remember playing in a cave at St. Cloud Hill. The Fort Negley staff hasn’t been able to determine where this cave was, exactly, and it may have been filled in either when the interstate went through or when the science center went in.
Two, the archaeology report recounts how many soldiers’ bodies were lost during a “flooding event” when a ten foot square sinkhole opened up in the make-shift cemetery and swallowed a bunch of graves. They were never recovered. That also suggests a cave system under the area.
And, if there is one, that makes this tunnel business a little easier to understand.There certainly could have been a cave entrance in the old city cemetery that is now plugged up with vaults. People who played in the caves may have had the sense that it stretched from the city cemetery to St. Cloud Hill. And the presence of an unopened trap door, which may have just led to a storage area of some sort, was easy enough to link to the memory of the old caves and turn into a tunnel.
