Fort Pillow State Historic Park preserves the site of Fort Pillow, a Confederate fort built in 1861 on the Chickasaw Bluffs above the Mississippi River, where surviving earthworks still trace the wartime defenses. Its commanding river position made it strategically important, and after Confederates evacuated it on June 4, 1862, Union forces occupied it for most of the war. The site is most closely tied to the Battle of Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864, when troops under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest killed surrendering African-American Union soldiers and some white officers in what historians classify as a massacre. Later recognized as both a battlefield and archaeological site, it also includes the legacy of postwar burial and preservation.