Longstreet's Headquarters

Bleak House went up in 1858 as a wedding gift to Robert Houston Armstrong and his wife, Louisa Franklin, from her father, and they named it for the Dickens novel. Enslaved people made the bricks on site. When Longstreet and McLaws took it over in November 1863, three Confederate sharpshooters in the tower were killed by Union cannon fire, and two of the balls are still lodged in the walls. A sharpshooter there is also believed to have fired the shot that mortally wounded General Sanders. Chapter 89 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy now owns the house.

What the plaque says

Longstreet's Headquarters "Bleak House," the home of Robert Houston Armstrong, was used as the headquarters of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet and Major Gen. Lafayette McLaws, CSA, during the siege of Knoxville, November, 1863.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — 2.4 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 3.6 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 15 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 17 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.

More markers nearby

• Death of Gen. William P. Sanders — 0.4 mi
• Sutherland Avenue McGhee Tyson Airport — 0.9 mi
• The Assault Upon Fort Sanders — 1.4 mi
• Fort Sanders — 1.5 mi