Bleak House

Bleak House, the home of Robert Houston Armstrong and Louisa Franklin Armstrong, is an Italianate-style mansion completed in 1858. During the Siege and Battle of Knoxville, November 17–December 4, 1863, the house served as Confederate Gen. James Longstreet’s headquarters. A sharpshooter unit, “The Elite Twenty,” occupied the house’s second-floor east-facing windows and the tower, armed with British Whitworth rifles accurate to about 1,500 yards. On November 18, when the Federal line was 750 yards east of the house, Union Gen. Williams P. Sanders ordered Lt. Samuel Benjamin in Fort Loudon to put a cannon shot through the tower to dislodge the sharpshooters. Called “The Prettiest Shot of the War” by the Federals, it hit the second floor at the southeast corner, killing three of the sharpshooters, and their pencil portraits remain on the tower’s interior north wall. That afternoon, Sanders was mortally wounded, reputedly by a sharpshooter, after watching Capt. Stephen Winthrop rally the Confederates, and Federal officials renamed Fort Loudon in his honor. During the fighting, Mrs. Armstrong and her daughters were confined to an upstairs bedroom for their safety, with a sentry ordered not to allow them downstairs without permission. Mrs. Armstrong once defied the sentry, and when she refused to return upstairs, he fired a warning shot into the stairway, where the .58 caliber minie ball remains. On December 4, Longstreet left Bleak House, which was riddled with many bullet holes and bore a shell scar in the main parlor.

Knoxville, Tennessee · United States