Longstreet's Crossing

Longstreet's move was a footrace to Knoxville. Burnside chose not to contest the Confederate advance and fell back quickly from his forward position near Loudon, so the pontoon bridge at Huff's Ferry let Longstreet slip past the Federal force across the river. At Knoxville, Longstreet and his chief engineer, Danville Leadbetter, judged the old Confederate Fort Loudon, which the Federals had renamed Fort Sanders after a general killed in a rearguard action, to be the weakest link in the line.

What the plaque says

Longstreet's Crossing Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, C.S.A., in his drive for Knoxville crossed the Tennessee River at Huff's Ferry a half mile to the north on a pontoon bridge, Nov. 13-15, 1863. He thus eluded a Federal force across the river on the east side of Loudon.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 13 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.
• Sequoyah Birthplace Museum — 13 mi
  The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' museum on Tellico Lake, near the town where Sequoyah was born, telling how he built the Cherokee syllabary and what the Tellico Dam drowned.
• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 14 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 19 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.

More markers nearby

• Railroad Trestle — 0.7 mi
• Lenoir Cotton Mill — 5.3 mi
• Battle of Philadelphia — 5.7 mi
• National Campground — 7.4 mi