Connection To Johnsonville

The railroad these men were forced to build had stalled in two pieces. Chartered in 1852 to join Nashville to the Mississippi River at Hickman, Kentucky, the Nashville and Northwestern was laid from both ends. When the war came, trains ran only from Nashville to Kingston Springs, about 24 miles, and from Hickman east to McKenzie. The Union Army carried the Nashville end on to Johnsonville on the Tennessee River, where steamboats could unload supplies for the city. The gap between the halves closed only after the war, and in 1872 the Nashville and Chattanooga took over the line.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 18 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 19 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 — 19 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.
• National Museum of African American Music — 19 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

• Patterson Forge — 1.9 mi
• Montgomery Bell — 1.9 mi
• Mound Bottom — 2.7 mi
• McNairy's Attack — 8.4 mi