June 30: Bloody Battle of Franklin

Considering how bad this battle was, I'd never heard of it. I'm sure it's taught in Tennessee history, maybe in southern history, but I don't remember it.

We rode a short bus to Franklin, TN to the Carter House and then to the Carnton Plantation after lunch. The photos above show the back of the house with the kitchen being the smaller, brick out building. The log building in the middle photo was not part of the original farm. It is a 200 year old building that has been moved onto the property recently. The last photo shows the front of the house.

The battle came about because the retreating Union troops could not get across the river in Nashville because the bridges had been burned down. Both sides converged in Franklin, southwest of Nashville. This was the Confederates' last ditch effort to win the war, almost a suicidal attempt. The Union soldiers had been in the area long enough to dig trenches - two lines of them - with walls of dirt in front of the trenches. On top of that dirt they placed piles of Osage Orange branches full of thorns. November 30, 1864, the Confederate General Hood, threw wave after wave of men into those trenches to break the Union's hold on the area. The Union did retreat to Nashville the next day leaving behind 2,500 bodies, 1,750 southern boys, to be buried by the 750 residents of Franklin.

All of these trenches were around the Carter House, a really nice home on the edge of Franklin. The family took refuge in the basement during the entire 5 hour battle. They came out the next morning to thousands of bodies - dead and wounded - about 10,000 young men and 500 horses. The photos show only a small number of bullet holes in the brick wall of one of the out buildings, in the red building that was the farm office and in the home (these were under the roof on the back porch). The really unusual part of this battle was that it started at 4:00 pm and went on into night. Very few Civil War battles were fought at night.










At this battle, so the stories went, one man had been shot several times but the Union troops managed to haul him back to their lines and nurse him back to health. He was General Douglas MacArthur's father. Another man was laid into a mass grave but someone saw him move an arm so they pulled him back out and found he was still alive. He would later father Helen Keller.

One of the Carter's said they couldn't even walk among the causalities - there were so many that there was no earth to step on. There were more lives lost in this 5 hour battle than in the first day of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. One of many sad stories, was the Carter's son, Tad, had joined the war at the beginning and ended up back here at his home for this battle where he was killed.

After touring this home, we went downtown to Monell's for lunch. This is a family style serving restaurant set in the original jail house of Williamson County. The food was excellent - pan fried chicken, meat loaf, 3 different salads, cheese grits with sausage, corn pudding (creamed corn to me), mashed potatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes & apples, field peas, biscuits, cornbread, peach preserves and bread pudding for dessert.

There were 49 field hospitals set up in and around Franklin with the Carnton Plantation, owned by the McGavick family - still today, being the largest of them. There were around 400 wounded men laid around in various rooms in this home which is located about 1 mile from the Carter house. Four dead generals were laid out on the porch. Many more had to be placed in the surrounding yard in the cold weather. There was so much blood in different rooms of the home from the areas where the surgeons stood trying to save lives and perform amputations that there are permanent blood stains in the floors. Historians feel that these were areas of surgery because they usually worked in front of a window where they could discard the amputated limb outside immediately after being removed. Carrie McGavick, the mistress of the home, walked among the wounded and dieing trying to administer aid and comfort. She was so well known for the work she did that one man she talked to years later said he had named his first born daughter after her.

For all you Kansan's, this is a photo of an Osage Orange on the plantation. It's about 150 years old. I don't know about any of you, but I've never seen one this big. This one is a little more than part of a wind break in a row of trees around a wheat field.

As the men died, they tried to identify and bury them on their property. Many were buried in mass graves around the battlefield. The McGavick's had them reburied on their property and spent the rest of their lives tending and caring for this cemetery. She had a book that she carried with her that was the locator of graves in the cemetery. The markers are about 6" square cement headstones with a number, sometimes initials, on them. She could reference the number to a name in most cases. There is also an area where many "unknowns" are buried. The cemetery is laid out by states - all southern. Mississippi had the most causalities at this battle. A total of 1,481 Confederate soldiers are buried in this special place along with the McGavick family.



There were 650,000 deaths in the entire Civil War. According to our tour guide, this would equate to 6 million deaths world wide today. This entire blog is a short version of all that Larry and I heard today. I won't say "learned" because a lot of it went over our heads. There were lots of battle and strategy discussions. Lots of statistics and stories and my brain will only retain so much. I still had to look up some of this information on-line to refresh my memory.

Later this evening, Larry and I built a small fire and roasted some hot dogs. Mighty good eating. I wanted to take pictures of the fire flies in our camp area. There are tons of them but they didn't seem to show up too well in photos. I have found out that the Ladybug and the Fire Fly are the state's insects.