Confederate Circle at Mount Olivet

Mount Olivet opened in 1856. After the war the Ladies Memorial Society of Nashville, working with Confederate veterans including William B. Bate and Benjamin Cheatham, bought a plot near the cemetery's center for the Confederate dead; the ground was dedicated in 1869 and a stone obelisk followed in 1889. Historians agree the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery; the circle is a postwar memorial to its dead. Also buried at Mount Olivet are Caroline Meriwether Goodlett, a founder of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and John W. Morton, founder of the Nashville Ku Klux Klan chapter.

What the plaque says

Confederate Circle at Mount Olivet After the War Between the States, the women of Nashville bought land at Mount Olivet, and formed Confederate Circle. The remains of about 1,500 Confederate soldiers were moved here from area battlefields. Seven Confederate generals were buried in or around the circle. They are William B. Bate, William N.R. Bealle, Benjamin Franklin Cheatham, William H. Jackson, George E. Maney, James E. Rains, and Thomas Benton Smith. Other prominent Nashville Confederates, Colonels Adolphus Heiman and Randall McGavock, lie nearby. A 45-foot granite monument marks the center of the circle.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Negley — 2.4 mi
  The largest inland stone fort of the Civil War, built in 1862 on St. Cloud Hill by more than 2,700 conscripted Black laborers, hundreds of whom died.
• Ryman Auditorium — 2.6 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 — 2.6 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.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 2.8 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.

More markers nearby

• George Woods — 0.9 mi
• Greenwood Park — 0.9 mi
• Buchannan's Station — 1.3 mi
• Walden College — 1.4 mi