Oaklands Mansion

For two weeks in July 1862, Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest led fourteen hundred cavalrymen through Middle Tennessee to raid, scout, and disrupt the Union Army of the Cumberland’s operations, fighting at Murfreesboro, on the outskirts of Nashville, at Manchester, and elsewhere while also destroying railroad tracks and cutting telegraph lines; this first independent command, and the first large-scale raid within Federal lines in the western theater, earned him promotion to brigadier general. On the morning of July 13, 1862, Union General Thomas T. Crittenden’s force at Murfreesboro was split into three detachments, including Colonel William Duffield and the 9th Michigan Infantry camped at Oaklands, the house of Lewis and Rachel Adeline Maney, around Maney’s Spring, with other Union troops guarding the courthouse in town and camped on Stones River northwest of town. Forrest divided his command and charged into Murfreesboro to attack all three Federal detachments at once, and part of the Battle of Murfreesboro unfolded on Oaklands’ front lawn as the Maney children watched from an upstairs window. Forrest’s troops quickly overpowered the Federals there, and Duffield, wounded in the fighting, remained at Oaklands, where the Maney family and their slaves cared for him until he had recovered enough to travel. In mid-December 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his aide Stephen D. Lee stayed at Oaklands; Davis reviewed Confederate troops nearby and wrote that the troops in Murfreesboro were in fine spirits and well supplied. In 1872, Lewis Maney filed a war damage claim for $27,000 for the plantation’s wartime losses, but federal authorities rejected it. Evergreen Cemetery, once part of the Maney plantation, lies east of Oaklands and contains Maney family burials as well as Confederate dead.

Murfreesboro, Tennessee · United States