Fort Negley Park's $50 Million Rehabilitation to Begin Spring 2025

The trajectory of Fort Negley Park has changed considerably since May 2017 when The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) first enrolled the site in its Landslide program following the City of Nashville’s proposal to redevelop some 21 of the park’s 55 acres to include residential, retail and commercial space.  The controversy also resulted in Fort Negley’s inclusion later that year in TCLF’s  thematic report and digital exhibition, Landslide 2017: Open Season on Open Space. Fortunately, those plans were thwarted in 2018, and further buttressed in 2019 when a “Restoration, Rehabilitation, and Cultural Landscape Report” was issued by the city. That year, validating the advocacy efforts and research findings, Fort Negley was named a UNESCO “Site of Memory,” the first such designation in the U.S. 

Now comes word that the implementation of the first phase of the $50 million Fort Negley Master Plan approved in 2022 will commence in spring 2025.  Earlier this year the city’s Metropolitan Council allocated approximately seventeen million dollars to implement phase one. Of that sum, two million dollars is reserved for the rehabilitation of the fortification’s stonework and three million dollars was used to partially fund the acquisition of a 2.36-acre parcel along the park’s northern edge. 

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The park, just over one mile south of Nashville’s downtown, is home to the Civil War-era Fort Negley. Constructed of white limestone on the crest of Saint Cloud Hill, Fort Negley was the crown jewel of the Federal fortifications and entrenchments that ringed the city. Federal troop encampments sprawled towards the city on the slope north of the fort, while Negley’s large guns protected the railroad and approaches to the south. To build these defensive works, the army “impressed” African Americans who were either being held as slaves or had fled from enslavement. 

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Thousands of these self-emancipated individuals congregated near federal encampments in refugee, or “contraband,” camps overseen by the army. Nashville had several contraband camps, including one near Fort Negley that developed into a sizeable post-war African American enclave. Archaeological evidence of an encampment exists, as well as trace outlines of fence rows and foundations from the neighborhood that developed in close proximity to the fort after the Civil War. 

At a public meeting on October 19, 2024, Mary Miller, principal and project manager of the Nashville-based landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm HDLA, presented final renderings and outlined the first phase of the project. This will include rehabilitation of the park’s southeast section, the site of a Minor League baseball stadium from 1978 to 2019, that will now feature a two-acre memorial lawn, dedicated to the free and enslaved people who perished constructing and defending the fortification in the nineteenth century. The lawn, accessed by a new entry plaza, will be encircled by a generous path edged by a low commemorative wall. From the memorial lawn curvilinear paths will proceed north, framing meadows and leading to overlooks and interpretive nodes, and a twenty-foot-wide promenade will lead west to the existing interpretive center, which will be rehabilitated during the project’s second phase. 

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The project will include an archaeological study of the Bass Street Community in the park’s northern section. Settled following the Civil War by formerly enslaved people who helped construct and defend the fortification, the community was razed in the 1950s and 1960s for the construction of Interstate 65. 

Phase one is expected to last eighteen months. Potions of the park will remain open during the rehabilitation efforts.