In 10 images, the beauty of Carnton mansion in Franklin, Tenn.

A massive, ancient osage orange tree helps frame the Carnton mansion, built in 1826.
(CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

PANORAMA: A view of the 11-room mansion and outbuildings at Carnton. (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)
Like this blog on Facebook
Like thousands of other families throughout the Union and Confederacy, Carrie and John McGavock and two of their children had front-row seats to the horror of the Civil War. The family's impressive, Federal-style house was a Confederate hospital during and after the Battle of Franklin (Tenn.) on Nov. 30, 1864. "Every room was filled, every bed had two poor bleeding fellows, every spare space, niche and corner under the stairs in the hall,  everywhere. ..." an Army of Tennessee veteran wrote decades after the war about Carnton, an 11-room mansion. "And when the noble old house could hold no more, the yard was appropriated until the wounded and dead filled that ..." On a hot afternoon recently at Carnton, visitors rocked in green chairs and chatted on the back porch -- the same porch where the bodies of four Confederate generals lay the morning after the battle.

The front entrance of Carnton, the ancestral home of the McGavock family. 

Perhaps this is the entrance President Andrew Jackson walked through as a guest at Carnton.

Side doors to the mansion, once part of the kitchen wing, which was destroyed in 1909 by a tornado.

View from garden of the back porch, where bodies of four Confederate generals killed at Franklin once lay.

           PANORAMA: Confederates used the McGavock's property as a staging area 
      during the battle on Nov. 30, 1864. (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)

Set against a blue sky, the west side of the 11-room mansion.

Flowers bloom within site of  Carnton's second-floor porch.

       PANORAMA: On Dec. 1, 1864, the bodies of Confederate generals Patrick Cleburne, 
    Hiram Granbury, John Adams and Otho Strahl lay on the first-floor porch at right.
                                      (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)

---

-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.