A visit to cemetery where Patrick Cleburne was initially buried

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Columbia, Tenn., doesn't just have a trendy public square -- check out handcrafted soap at Buff City Soap! -- it has rich Civil War history, too. Five miles from town, you'll find the four plantation sites of the Polk brothers. Two of the plantation mansions -- Rattle And Snap and Hamilton Place -- still stand. Gideon Pillow's Clifton Place plantation is roughly 1 1/2 miles from the Polks'. Less than a quarter-mile from the soap store stands Rally Hill, the mansion where Confederate General Frank Armstrong was married in a ceremony attended by Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Confederacy's most notorious womanizer.

Hamilton Place, plantation mansion 
of Lucius Junius Polk. Confederate artillery 
officer Robert Beckham, wounded at
the Battle of Columbia, died here.

Roughly a mile or so from the public square, check out Rose Hill Cemetery (see video of my visit above), the final resting place of John C. Carter, one of six Confederate generals who died of wounds suffered at the Battle of Franklin on Nov. 30, 1864. (Quick: Name the others. Don't look below, cheater! One of them has "pandemic hair.") 

Patrick Cleburne, also killed at Franklin, was briefly interred at Rose Hill. So were generals Otho Strahl and Hiram Granbury. But when their comrades discovered Yankees were also buried at Rose Hill, they were removed and re-buried elsewhere -- the "Stonewall of the West" was moved to St. John's Church Episcopal Cemetery, across the road from the plantation of Leonidas/Andrew Polk. The Irishman was removed from St. John's and re-buried in his adopted state of Arkansas in 1870. 

Confederate generals who died of wounds suffered at the Battle of Franklin (clockwise from upper left): Patrick Cleburne, John C. Carter, States Rights Gist, Otho Strahl,
Hiram Granbury and John Adams.

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