The Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center stands on West Linden Street at the site of Battery Robinett, where the climactic fighting of the October 1862 battle took place. The National Park Service opened it in 2004 as a unit of Shiloh National Military Park. Interactive displays and multimedia presentations cover the siege and battle of Corinth, and a courtyard of stone and flowing water traces the growth of the United States, the rise of sectionalism and the four years of war.
Corinth mattered because the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, running east and west, crossed the Mobile and Ohio, running north and south, in the middle of town. One Confederate officer called the two lines the vertebrae of the Confederacy. Shiloh in April 1862 was fought over this crossing. The bloodied Confederate army fell back to Corinth, which became one large hospital, and Union forces besieged it until the Confederates slipped away on 30 May. In October the Confederates under Earl Van Dorn attacked, broke through several forts and reached downtown before being driven off, with thousands dead and wounded on each side.
Union troops then held the town until January 1864. Corinth National Cemetery, set up in 1866, holds the remains of nearly six thousand Union soldiers. The other story Corinth tells is freedom. Enslaved people fled here for protection, and the Corinth Contraband Camp, less than two miles away, is told as its own stop.
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