Union IV Corps at Blue Springs

The chaplain whose letters describe this winter camp served the 35th Indiana, the First Irish, for the whole war. Peter Paul Cooney was born in County Roscommon, Ireland, in 1822 and grew up on a farm near Monroe, Michigan. A Notre Dame graduate of 1851 and a Holy Cross priest, he joined the regiment in 1861 and stayed through Murfreesboro and Nashville, where a general called him meek, pious and brave as a lion. After the war he preached missions and temperance, served briefly as Holy Cross provincial, and died in 1905.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Red Clay State Historic Park — 6.9 mi
  The last seat of the Cherokee Nation before removal, where eleven general councils met from 1832 to 1837, now a state park with a council house replica, a sacred spring and an eternal flame.
• Walnut Street Bridge — 23 mi
  An 1890 truss bridge now open to walkers, and the place where Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 were lynched, the case that led to the Supreme Court's only criminal trial.
• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 23 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 23 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.

More markers nearby

• Cherokee History — 4.2 mi
• Cleveland During the Civil War — 5.3 mi
• Masonic Female Institute — 5.6 mi
• Red Clay Council Ground — 6.6 mi