Fight at Hollow Tree Gap

Edmund W. Pettus, whose Alabama brigade held this gap on December 17, 1864, later gave his name to a bridge in Selma. Born in Limestone County, Alabama, in 1821, he graduated from Clinton College in Smith County, Tennessee. After the war he chaired Alabama's delegation to Democratic national conventions for two decades, and accounts name him Grand Dragon of the state's Ku Klux Klan in the last year of Reconstruction. Elected to the U.S. Senate at 75, he died in office in 1907. The bridge, dedicated in 1940, became the scene of Bloody Sunday in March 1965.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carnton — 4.9 mi
  The McGavock farm in Franklin, worked by 44 enslaved people in 1860, that became the largest field hospital of the Battle of Franklin.
• Fort Negley — 12 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.
• National Museum of African American Music — 13 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.
• Ryman Auditorium — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Retreat from Nashville — 2.9 mi
• John Price Buchannan — 3.3 mi
• Liberty and Justice for All, Denied — 3.6 mi
• John H. Eaton — 3.6 mi