Fort Negley

Just over a mile south of Nashville’s downtown is Fort Negley Park, an urban greenspace that occupies the Civil War site of “Fort Negley.” While the fort is significant in military history as the largest inland masonry fortification built during the Civil War, this city-owned park contains other important historic, cultural, and natural landscape features that connect to virtually every era of Nashville’s past.

Background

Most of the 55 acres in Fort Negley Park once belonged to Judge John Overton, one of Tennessee’s most prominent early citizens, who began acquiring the land between 1805 and 1828. Overton’s tract, which featured a rocky prominence known locally as “Saint Cloud Hill,” remained undeveloped until the Civil War, when the Union Army occupied Nashville in 1862 and seized the land to fortify the city. 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. It was built by African Americans who were enslaved or had fled from enslavement.

In the early twentieth century, Civil War commemorative efforts inspired three unsuccessful attempts to establish a National Battlefield Park at Fort Negley in remembrance of the 1864 Battle of Nashville. In 1928 Nashville’s Parks Board purchased Overton’s Saint Cloud Hill tract from his heirs with the intent of restoring the fort “as it was during the Civil War and make of the land a public park.” In 1935 the Board applied for Works Progress Administration (WPA) funding to develop the land into “a decided addition to the park system of the City of Nashville besides adding an excellent historical point of interest for tourists.”

By 1941 relief workers had transformed nearly 50 acres passed down through Overton’s family into a multi-use public recreation facility that included the restored fort and stockade, a sports complex with four softball fields, a hardball field that was also used as a boxing ring, stone bleachers and a comfort station, open greenspace, and hundreds of feet of limestone walls. A significant amount of WPA-built stonework remains in Fort Negley Park. Workers quarried the limestone on-site, mining the hillside and exposing a large stratum of 500-million-year-old fossil coral.

By the beginning of World War II the restored fort’s wooden stockade had deteriorated, and the fort was closed to the public. However, softball games continued to be held at the WPA-built diamonds. In the late 1970s the Nashville Sounds baseball team leased the ball field section of Fort Negley Park and built Greer Stadium and parking lots on the site.

The city’s Fort Negley Master Plan (1996) focused on re-opening the fort to public visitation and stabilizing its WPA-era dry-stacked masonry walls. Since then, research has revealed archaeological remains. On the northeast edge of the park is the vestige of what appears to be an old roadbed. Historic maps suggest that this is a section of the lane that led into the city’s first Catholic cemetery, built before 1850. Though barely visible, this unique cultural landscape feature is a tangible connection to Nashville’s early nineteenth-century Irish and German immigration story. Prior to the Civil War, the cemetery was relocated to make way for construction of one of Nashville’s early railroads.

On the hillside north and east of the fort archaeologists found evidence of federal encampments and a portion of a federal entrenchment. North of the entrenchment, along the park’s northern boundary, are trace outlines of fence rows and foundations from an African American neighborhood that developed near the fort after the Civil War. These lot lines also connect to Nashville’s urban renewal and Civil Rights era since a considerable amount of land in this neighborhood was taken in the 1960s for construction of an interstate highway and interchange.

Fort Negley, which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, is Nashville’s only intact Civil War era fort. In 2004 Fort Negley was reopened to the public on the 140th anniversary of the Battle of Nashville; it was designated a local Historic Landmark District in 2005. The Sounds moved to a new stadium in 2015, allowing its site to be reclaimed as park space.