Occupied Chattanooga (Northshore)

Camp Contraband sat on this north bank in 1864 and 1865, a refuge for formerly enslaved people. Residents could earn wages and learn, and they also faced disease and hostility. Five infantry regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops, the 14th, 16th, 18th, 42nd and 44th, were based in Chattanooga; the 42nd built the city's first bridge. By the war's end Black residents were about half of the city's people. After the regiments mustered out in 1866, many veterans settled among the camp's families, and the community grew into Hill City.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Walnut Street Bridge — steps away
  An 1890 truss bridge now open to walkers, and the place where Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 were lynched, the case that led to the Supreme Court's only criminal trial.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 0.3 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.
• Ross's Landing — 0.5 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.
• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 1.1 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.

More markers nearby

• Ernest Walter Holmes, Sr. — 0.5 mi
• Cameron Hill — 0.5 mi
• Chattanooga's First School — 0.7 mi
• William "Uncle Bill" Lewis — 0.8 mi