Lotz House

In September 1864, after Union Gen. William T. Sherman defeated Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood at Atlanta, Hood moved north into Tennessee rather than contest Sherman's March to the Sea. Gen. John M. Schofield, detached from Sherman's army, delayed Hood at Columbia and Spring Hill before falling back to Franklin. The devastating battle there on November 30 crippled the Confederates, though they pursued Schofield to the outskirts of Nashville before Hood's campaign ended when Union Gen. George H. Thomas crushed his army on December 15-16. Some of the fiercest fighting at Franklin occurred near the house that German immigrant Johann A. Lotz built in 1858. Fearing its destruction, Lotz, his wife Margaret, and their three children sheltered in the cellar of the nearby Carter House. When the battle began just before sundown on November 30, 1864, Federal troops surrounded the area. The 175th Ohio Infantry, a newly recruited regiment, held a position east of Columbia Pike just south of the house near the 12th and 16th Kentucky Infantry. Col. Emerson Opdycke's brigade soon arrived immediately north of the Carter House and waited in reserve across the road from the house. The Confederate assault broke a hole in the center of the Union defenses south of there, and large numbers of Southern troops poured through the Federal line, but the reserve units quickly counterattacked. The 73rd Illinois Infantry of Opdycke's command, together with the 175th Ohio and the Kentucky regiments, rushed forward and repulsed the Confederates who had broken through the earthworks. The Union regiments then reoccupied the line and held it against repeated attacks. South of the house and east toward the Carter cotton gin, savage fighting also unfolded, and the Confederates were driven back. After the battle, the house served as a hospital, and Lotz and his family moved to California shortly after the war.

Franklin, Tennessee · United States