Fort Sanders

Union engineers raised the work as Fort Loudon, the name Confederates kept using, and it became Fort Sanders on November 24, 1863, for the cavalry officer mortally wounded a week earlier. The bastioned earthwork had a ditch about 12 feet wide and 6 to 8 feet deep. Roughly 440 men held it, from the 79th New York, 29th Massachusetts and 20th and 2nd Michigan, with four 20-pounder Parrott rifles, six Napoleons and two three-inch rifles. The ridge it sat on stood at least 100 feet above the ground around it.

What the plaque says

Fort Sanders Fort Sanders, a bastioned earthwork on the ridge two blocks north of here, was the scene of Gen. James Longstreet's unsuccessful assault upon the Federal defenses of Knoxville at dawn, Nov. 29, 1863.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blount Mansion — 0.9 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 2.1 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 15 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 17 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• General Clifton Bledsoe Cates 1895-1970 United States Marine Corps — steps away
• Fort Byington — steps away
• James Rufus Agee — steps away
• University of Tennessee — steps away