BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
Nashville has a plan to preserve Fort Negley Park?one that many hope deals with its violent past.
FROM THE MAY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
Fort Negley Park, a 55-acre swath of open space two miles south of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, is most famous as the site of a prominent stone masonry fortification built during the Civil War after Union soldiers seized the city. Built out of earth and dry-stacked limestone, Fort Negley is said to be the largest inland fort constructed during the war. It helped the North retain control of Nashville and eventually win the war.
The structure itself, however, was built by nearly 3,000 African American men and women, who were ?impressed? against their will?rounded up on the street or pulled out of church services, some of them as young as 13 years old. A quarter of them died, either from injury or mistreatment. They were buried near the fort, outside the ?contraband? camps where the laborers lived. Today, the surrounding neighborhoods are still predominantly African American. The racial history of Fort Negley gained national attention last year when the city approved a development proposal for 21 acres of the park, which had been purchased in 1928. The parcel in question, in the park?s southeast corner, had been leased to the Nashville Sounds, a minor league baseball team, in the late 1970s. The team built a stadium and a parking lot, but then left Nashville in 2014. The city solicited ideas for t...