Baseball in Civil War Nashville

The low field where Union soldiers played grew into one of the oddest ballparks in the minor leagues. Sulphur Dell, as sportswriter Grantland Rice named it, sat below street level less than a quarter mile from the Cumberland and flooded often. Its right field wall stood only 262 feet from home plate, and the ground rose toward it at a 45-degree angle, so right fielders played on a shelf halfway up the slope. Pitchers called the park Sulphur Hell, and visiting teams called it The Dump for the smoke from the city landfill beyond right field.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee State Capitol — 0.4 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 0.6 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• Ryman Auditorium — 0.8 mi
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.
• National Museum of African American Music — 0.8 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Two Governors, Two Governments — 0.2 mi
• Great French Lick — 0.3 mi
• Tennessee State Capitol — 0.4 mi
• Morris Memorial Building — 0.4 mi