Carnton Plantation

After Union Gen. William T. Sherman defeated Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood at Atlanta in September 1864, Hood led the Army of Tennessee northwest against Sherman’s supply lines and then 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 battle there on November 30 crippled the Confederates, though they continued to the outskirts of Nashville before Union Gen. George H. Thomas crushed Hood’s army on December 15-16. Carnton had been built in 1826 by Randal McGavock, a prominent Nashville resident and friend of Andrew Jackson, and after his death in 1843 his son John McGavock inherited and improved the house. Late on the afternoon of November 30, 1864, John McGavock, his wife Carrie, and their two young children were caught between almost 40,000 Confederate and Federal soldiers in the Battle of Franklin. At 4 P.M., the Confederate Army of Tennessee launched a massive frontal assault, at least as large as Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, against the Federal defenses south of Franklin, and in the face of withering Union artillery fire the Confederate right wing swept past Carnton. Five hours later, 9,500 American soldiers on both sides were dead, wounded, or missing. Carnton became a field hospital for Confederate Gen. William W. Loring’s division, with 300 suffering men jammed into the house by the middle of the night and hundreds more across the lawn and in the outbuildings. Carrie McGavock’s sheets, towels, and tablecloths, along with John McGavock’s shirts, were torn up for bandages as wounded men bled and died on the floors and under the stairs. By dawn, the bodies of four dead Confederate generals—Patrick R. Cleburne, Hiram B. Granbury, John Adams, and Otho F. Strahl—lay on the back porch. In 1866, John and Carrie McGavock established what became known as the McGavock Confederate Cemetery nearby and reburied the remains of 1,481 Southern soldiers from temporary graves south of town, maintaining the cemetery until their deaths in 1893 and 1905, respectively.

Franklin, Tennessee · United States