Fort Pickering (Protecting Memphis)

The fort's other story is the camps beside it. Enslaved people from Arkansas and Mississippi fled to Union lines at Memphis, and the Army housed families at Camp Shiloh in 1862 and Camp Fiske in 1863, with churches and schools. By December 1863 nearly 1,200 men had joined the 3rd U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, which manned the river guns under Col. Ignatz Kappner. Many families stayed near the fort after the war. In May 1866, days after the regiment was mustered out, white mobs killed 46 Black residents in the Memphis massacre.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.1 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.1 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• Beale Street — 1.6 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 2.2 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Fort Assumption — steps away
• Fort Pickering — steps away
• Memphis Martyrs — 0.3 mi
• WLOK Radio Station — 1.2 mi