Gunboats & Cavalry November 4, 1864

Much of the fire at Johnsonville was set by the Union side. Confederate guns across the Tennessee River disabled the Union gunboats and shelled the wharf, and then the garrison commander ordered the supply vessels burned to keep them from capture. For nearly a mile the riverfront burned through the night. The depot fed the army under George Thomas at Nashville, and its loss hampered him while John Bell Hood's army advanced, though Thomas still beat Hood that December. Kentucky Lake now covers much of the battlefield.

What the plaque says

Gunboats & Cavalry November 4, 1864 8½ miles east, at Johnsonville Landing, Forrest's Cavalry Corps, after blocking river approaches from both directions with captured Federal vessels and gunfire, destroyed the Federal base at Johnsonville. Losses were 4 gunboats, 14 steamboats, 17 barges, about 95,000 tons of QM stores: 150 prisoners were captured. Confederate losses were 2 killed and 9 wounded.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Patsy Cline Crash Site Memorial — 3.6 mi
  An engraved rock off Mt. Carmel Road near Camden marking where a small plane carrying Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins went down on March 5, 1963.
• Johnsonville State Historic Park — 7.4 mi
  A Tennessee River park on the site of a Union supply depot shelled in November 1864 and of the town later drowned by Kentucky Lake, with earthworks, a railroad bed and an African American cemetery.
• Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  A 51,000-acre refuge along Kentucky Lake and the Tennessee River, created in 1945 for migratory birds, with a visitor center in Springville and a drowned Archaic site nearby.
• Natchez Trace State Park — 27 mi
  A New Deal state park built on worn-out West Tennessee farmland, where the Fairfield Gullies show what erosion did and kudzu was planted to stop it.

More markers nearby

• Governor Alvin Hawkins — 8.9 mi
• Jesse James — 10.0 mi
• Henry County Courthouse/Henry Co. — 10 mi
• Skirmish at Mansfield — 13 mi