McNairy's Attack

The park whose gate this panel marks was a New Deal project built largely by young Black men. Dickson County business leaders won one of five parks the National Park Service planned for Middle Tennessee, persuading federal officials that the land qualified as submarginal. Work began in 1935 on a recreational demonstration area, and that December Company 4495, a junior African American Civilian Conservation Corps company from Knoxville, arrived. Its men built Lake Acorn and Lake Woodhaven, and probably early cabins, before other companies relieved them in 1941. The Park Service deeded the land to Tennessee in 1943.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gordon House and Ferry Site — 25 mi
  A brick house of 1818 beside the Duck River at milepost 407.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, where a Chickasaw partner and a Tennessee captain ran a ferry and an inn.
• Carnton — 26 mi
  The McGavock farm in Franklin, worked by 44 enslaved people in 1860, that became the largest field hospital of the Battle of Franklin.
• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 26 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.

More markers nearby

• The Old Log House — 1.8 mi
• Frank Goad Clement — 7.0 mi
• Civil War In Charlotte — 8.2 mi
• Connection To Johnsonville — 8.4 mi