Fort Negley

The Union army took Nashville in February 1862, and that autumn it ringed the city with forts built by Black people who had no say in it. From August to December 1862 more than 2,700 conscripted laborers, mostly people who had escaped slavery along with free Black Nashvillians, built Fort Negley on St. Cloud Hill. Julia Casey, who lived in its shadow, later recalled that soldiers kidnapped her sister and two of her brothers. In another account, soldiers surrounded a Black Baptist church during Sunday service and marched the congregation up the hill to work.

They cleared the hilltop, cut limestone and hauled the blocks for what became the largest inland stone fort of the war. An estimated 600 to 800 men and women died building Nashville's fortifications, from exposure, hunger and disease, and only 310 laborers were ever paid. By the end of the war Black Nashvillians had helped build twenty-three fortifications. The fort's guns helped drive back Hood's army in the Battle of Nashville on December 15 and 16, 1864.

The Works Progress Administration rebuilt the fort in 1936 with 800 men, and the city reopened it in 2004. A visitors center followed in 2007, with films and touch screens on occupied Nashville. The park trail runs about half a mile, and the fort itself has been under construction as part of a master plan, so call ahead.