Remembering Black Nashville at Fort Negley

"Fort Negley"

You were built by the hands of the oppressed and some men free,your craftsmanship remains for future generations to see. Yourfoundation was built with stone, wood and railroad steel,as you majestically sit upon "St. Cloud Hill."

Once a Union stronghold standing tall and bold,threw countless decades your remains became "tattered and old."The sounds of the bulge rally the troops no more,just the echoes of a divided past we must not ignore.

You whisper silently from your once vibrant past,to make known your "treasure's of history" that we humbly unmask.There is a rebirth in you now for the ages to see, handed down fromour ancestors their "legacy to be."

Your in our hands now, a task certainly not forsaken, forthe "City of Nashville," we all have gallantly taken.

You fortify our thoughts in your new beginning, leaving your mark forthe future to see, once a "mighty fortress" in the heart of our city,a place called..."Fort Negley"

—Gary M. Burke, 13th United States Colored Troops living historian, memberof the Friends of Fort Negley Board of Directors, and descendant of PeterBailey, Company K, 17th United States Colored Troops¹

"Nashville, Tenn., from Fort Negley looking northeast." Photo by George N. Barnard, 1864.

(Courtesy of Library of Congress)

In September 2017, the fate of Fort Negley, a Civil War era fort near downtown Nashville, Tennessee, seemed sealed. Mixed-use, private development—a ubiquitous feature in the "New Nashville"—would soon cast a permanent shadow over the star-shaped US military fort. That is, if the fort survived Cloud Hill Development Corporation's dynamiting, demolition, and construction on twenty-one acres of the Fort Negley Park's southern, eastern, and north-eastern slopes, replacing the now abandoned Herschel Greer Baseball Stadium. Spurred by an interest in Fort Negley's history and this more recent development controversy, a group of Vanderbilt University graduate students, faculty, and staff planned a new project to document the fort's legacy in Nashville, specifically as a site of Black history.² Naming ourselves the Fort Negley Descendants Project (FNDP), we set out to capture what this place means to Black Nashvillians and to preserve and circulate mostly unpublished stories about the fort's history to a city undergoing immense transformation.

Fort Negley rests on St. Cloud Hill, roughly a mile south of downtown Nashville. Almost within earshot of the sounds of Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton reverberating from the honky-tonk bars, Fort Negley Park's sixty-four acres are a largely unadvertised feature of Nashville's culture. But neglect is nothing new to Fort Negley. Built in 1862 in the wake of Nashville's surrender to the US Army, it was a symbol of Confederate failure with a legacy that few white southerners desired to preserve following the Civil War. The fort held special significance to Nashville's Black communities, however, as after the war, living areas on the hill and in nearby contraband camps formed some of the city's earliest free Black neighborhoods. Its association with emancipation and wartime US military presence also made it a target for both neglect and Ku Klux Klan rallies.

Fort Negley has struggled to remain a visible and accessible site of memory at the center of African American liberation in Civil War Nashville. Following the conclusion of the Civil War, many Black laborers and veterans established neighborhoods in the areas surrounding federal fortifications such as Fort Negley. However, the fort itself fell into disrepair during the postwar period. The city of Nashville purchased St. Cloud Hill in 1928.³ In 1936, the Works Progress Administration began reconstruction of the fort and built segregated recreation fields at the base of the hill. The city kept the fort open until 1945 when officials deemed it too costly to maintain safely. The African American playground and single ball diamond at the base of the north side of the hill existed until the 1960s when urban renewal eliminated it...