The Carter House

After Union Gen. William T. Sherman defeated Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood at Atlanta in September 1864, Hood moved into Tennessee, where Gen. John M. Schofield delayed him at Columbia and Spring Hill before falling back to Franklin; after the bloody fighting there on November 30 crippled the Confederates, Hood followed Schofield to Nashville, where Union Gen. George H. Thomas crushed Hood's army on December 15-16. At the start of the Civil War, Fountain B. Carter was a widower whose wife, Polly, had died in 1852, and all three of his sons joined the Confederate army, though by late 1862 the oldest, Moscow, had returned home to help with the farm while Tod and Francis remained in service. On November 30, 1864, the Battle of Franklin centered on the Carter property, where before sunrise Union General Jacob D. Cox established his headquarters in the house and oversaw construction of the Federal defensive line. At 4 P.M., Hood's army attacked, briefly broke through, and became locked in violent hand-to-hand fighting around the house and across the farm, while the Carter family and the Albert Lotz family from across the road sheltered in the basement. The Confederate breakthrough was soon shattered, the Federals regained the upper hand, and by 9 P.M. nearly 10,000 soldiers from both sides were dead, wounded, or captured. Among them was Tod Carter, found after midnight just southwest of the house; he died there on December 2 in the home where he had been raised. Fountain Branch Carter built the house about 1829 and over the next thirty years expanded his holdings to nearly 300 acres, raising corn, grain, and livestock, later adding cotton and building a gin southeast of the house across Columbia Pike. Like many Southern farms of similar size, the operation depended on slavery, and by 1860 Carter owned 28 enslaved people ranging in age from infancy to the mid-60s.

Franklin, Tennessee · United States