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| Obscured by trees and brush, the pedestal of the original Battle of Nashville Peace Monument. (CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.) |
Attendees included a few Confederate veterans — certainly in their mid-80s to early 90s — wearing their old, tattered uniforms. "Bowed gray heads paid tribute to the valor of the heroes of the North as well as those of the South in whose honor the monument is built on the battlefield," the Nashville Tennessean reported the next day.
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| The original Battle of Nashville monument was dedicated on Nov. 11, 1927. |
Nearly 91 years after the dedication, two visitors to the monument site find a much different scene. Yards away, two residents of a drab apartment complex nearby work on a decrepit car in a small lot. On the knoll where hundreds gathered for the monument dedication on a fall day in 1927, trees and brush now obscure the view beyond.
Wary of their surroundings, the visitors take a circuitous route to the top of the knoll, eluding briars, spider webs, trash and who knows what else along the way. A steady roar of traffic on Franklin Road proves unnerving. Then huge blocks of marble, framed by leaves and brush, appear in a small clearing. It's the long-forgotten pedestal of the once-majestic monument to the valor of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb, who fought at Nashville on Dec. 15-16, 1864.
The monument stood defiantly on the site until 1974, when a tornado toppled its obelisk and angel, destroying them. By the early 1980s, construction of an interstate had made what was left of it a castaway on a tiny island in a sea of development. A second iteration of the monument was dedicated on a new site nearby in 1999.
Fascinated with what remains of Moretti's masterpiece, the amateur historians examine it closely. A strange blue stains the pedestal, likely the result of oxidation of the bronze statuary atop it long ago. Victimized by time and nature, marble blocks are separating. Intrigued, the visitors read inscriptions on the side and reverse of the slabs of stone.
“A monument like this, standing on such memories, having no reference to utilities," a sentence begins, "becomes a sentiment, a poet, a prophet, an orator to every passerby.”
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| Inscriptions on the side of the weather-beaten pedestal. |
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| A tornado topped the 40-foot obelisk atop this pedestal in 1974. |
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SOURCES
- Nashville Tennessean, Oct. 3, 1926, Nov. 12, 1927
Thank you for bringing this monument and its blight into our consciousness. How sad. It certainly shows a decline in our society's state of everything. Dystopia is with us.
ReplyDeleteSad to see. Do you have any information on the left wing of Sherman's army as it entered Columbia SC's western edge and the route they took leaving Columbia?
ReplyDeleteIs this site on private property? I will be in Nashville next week and would like to visit that place. Any suggestions and recommendations you could make would be welcome. If you have any and would prefer to communicate privately, please let me know and I will provide my email or Facebook address. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI well remember this monument, which imposingly stood on a hill along Franklin Road across from where Thompson Lane dead-ended into Franklin Road until the early 1970s. I attended memorial events there during the Civil War Centennial. During construction work that connected Thompson Lane with Woodmont Blvd. by means of a flyover bridge across Franklin Road, the contractor constructed an enclosed wooden framework around the monument that stretched the entire height of the monument, to protect it from potential flying debris during blasting. Of course, since its construction in 1927, the obelisk-like monument had weathered many wind storms, probably because its slender stone shaft posed little wind resistance. However, it has been surmised that the enclosed wooden framework around the monument permitted the wind to topple the monument. Many shattered pieces of the marble monument and its mangled bronze sculptures lay on the site for quite a while. About a year after the tornado, on the site of the monument I dug out of the dirt a one-foot wing-section of the marble angel which crowned the obelisk. Although I am glad that pieces of the original monument were utilized in a replacement monument located at the intersection of Granny White Pike and Battlefield Drive, the present monument pales in comparison to the original.
ReplyDelete