Crossroads of War

The general who failed to stop Bragg in these mountains lost his army within two months. Don Carlos Buell had sought a limited war that would leave Southern civilian life and slavery undisturbed, which earned him the nickname McClellan of the West. Critics faulted his slow pursuit after Perryville, and on October 24, 1862, he was relieved and replaced by William Rosecrans. A military commission examined his campaign, but its findings were never made public. He resigned in 1864, ran the Green River Iron Company in Kentucky and died at Rockport in 1898.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sewanee: The University of the South — 5.8 mi
  The Episcopal university on the Cumberland Plateau, founded in 1857 as a school for the slaveholding South and now examining that history through its own Roberson Project.
• Savage Gulf State Park — 17 mi
  Roughly 19,000 acres of gorge and sandstone bluff on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, a state park of its own since 2022, with the Stone Door and a National Natural Landmark.
• Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park — 23 mi
  A 2,000-year-old enclosure of piled stone and earth on the bluffs above the forks of the Duck River, built by Native people between about 80 and 550 A.D., with a museum and waterfall trails.
• Tims Ford State Park — 24 mi
  A lake park on the Elk River below the Cumberland Plateau, made by a 1970 TVA dam on land the Cherokee and Chickasaw ceded by treaty in the early 1800s.

More markers nearby

• Monteagle Sunday School Assembly — 0.6 mi
• Highlander Folk School 1932-1962 — 1.5 mi
• Struggling Through the Mountains — 1.9 mi
• Fiery Gizzard — 5.3 mi