Tales from the road: Devilish terrain at Armstrong Hill

A post-war pond on ground where fighting occurred in 1863.

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On a gorgeous fall morning, I pull into the parking lot at High Ground Park, roughly two miles south of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. My aim is to walk the obscure Armstrong Hill battlefield, where a sharp, two- or three-hour fight broke out Nov. 25, 1863, during the Confederates’ siege of the city.

But I’m directionally challenged, so I call on the man who turned me on to this unheralded (and unmarked) battlefield.

I navigated this path to the pond.

“Where is Armstrong Hill?” I ask my new friend Tim, a Knoxville Civil War Roundtable board member.

“Walk down the path by the two-tiered parking lot,” he says over the phone. “And go through the gate.”

While navigating a steep grade, a carpet of leaves crunches beneath my feet. To my left, I find a deep ravine — think Pickett’s Mill times two — and thick woods. The Confederates occupied ground in that direction, Tim says. To my right is Armstrong Hill, ground occupied by the United States Army.

“Can you imagine fighting here while carrying all that equipment?” Tim says as I take in the devilish terrain.

In Knoxville, where frenzied developers seem intent on carving up every square inch of ground, it’s remarkable that this Civil War oasis exists at all. 

Over the phone, Tim guides me down the path, past a modern, graffiti-covered retaining wall, to a massive, post-war body of water. "A pond," Tim calls it, but it's really a small lake. In 1863, in what was then a flat, open field, the armies clashed here, he says.

The steep terrain of the Armstrong Hill battlefield.

At the very bottom of the path, through the trees, I spy across the Tennessee River a cement plant — a brief, unwanted intrusion from 2024.

After my return to Nashville, I dig for information on this battle that resulted in probably no more than a couple hundred casualties.

"Never was a fortified position held longer against such odds," a Union soldier wrote in 1864 of the fighting at Armstrong Hill. "And never was the bravery of troops subjected to a severer test."

Now I'm hooked. So what can you tell me about the Battle of Armstrong Hill?

A modern graffiti-covered retaining wall on the battlefield.

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SOURCE

— The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, Jan 15, 1864