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Make sure you take a tour inside the Carnton plantation home while attending Blue and Gray Days in Franklin this weekend. This video shows the bloodstains on the floor in the house.
It was a glorious evening in Franklin tonight as hundreds – perhaps even thousands – came out to Carnton Plantation to attend the 145th commemoration of the Battle of Franklin. 10,000 candles were illuminated and placed in scores of rows on the Eastern Flank at Carnton to honor the 10,000 estimated casualties that occurred at Franklin (November 30, 1864).
A full photo gallery of the event is here. Also check out my videos on my YouTube folder.
Franklin, Tennessee, probably only had a population between 2,000 residents in 1864. That includes children. The Battle of Franklin resulted in up to 10,000 casualties: killed, wounded, missing, etc. Franklin residents banded together on the morning of December 1st, 1864, and opened their homes, churches and businesses to tend to the incredible suffering and carnage. One of those homes was that of John and Carrie McGavock.
Historian Eric Jacobson recounts that challenge in this video.
Also: see this video of Dr. Chris Lossom talk about the carnage after the battle too.
Eric Jacobson describes A.P. Stewart’s Confederate Corps made up of the Divisions of Loring, Walthall and French, coming across the Eastern flank, across the McGavock farm, as the battle unfolded [Watch now, 1:42]
Read about the dedication of the marker to Loring’s Division on the Eastern flank in June 2008.
At least 2,000 men were killed at Franklin, in just five hours. The South suffered 60-70 percent of the casualties. About 1,750 of the killed were on the Confederate side. Around 200 Union soldiers died. The percentage of men killed at Franklin-compared to the number of total men engaged– ranks as one of the highest kill-rates of any Civil War battle, far bloodier than even Gettysburg.
But for now appreciate this fact. The terrified residents of Franklin woke up the next morning—for those that could sleep– to a ghastly sight near their beloved town. Thousands of Confederate soldiers were lying on the cold ground. Many had died in the night from bleeding to death or from the sub-zero temperatures. Making it even worse was the fact that a couple hundred of these men claimed Tennessee as their native soil. Soil that would soon serve as a blanket for eternity for these brave soldiers, some just boys.
Farmers like James McNutt and Fountain Branch Carter must have been impacted for years afterwards. Their farms served as temporary cemeteries for the soldiers immediately after the battle. The Union army, whose objective was always to make it to Nashville and not fight at Franklin, evacuated during the late night of November 30th, leaving scores of their wounded and dying on the ground as well. Before they left they hastily buried as many of their own dead as they could.
By the afternoon of December 1st, 1864, hundreds of wounded Confederates had already been evacuated to local field-hospitals like Carnton, and in other homes of Franklin citizens. Local churches like St. Paul’s Episcopal, pictured right, were also used to care for the wounded and dying. Since John Bell Hood did not have much time, and he wanted to pursue Schofield’s army north, he detached some burial teams to take care of burying the hundreds of fallen Confederates at Franklin.
The burial teams had much work to do and it had to be done quickly. All of the Confederate dead were identified as best they could be, by name, state, rank, and regiment. They were then placed in long rows, usually by twos, in shallow two to three foot deep graves along the main line of entrenchments. The soldiers were given wooden markers to notate their identities. A Union soldier passing by two weeks later remarked that he counted over 1,700 Confederate graves.
About a year later the condition of the graves were already in poor condition. The wooden markers, now enduring their second winter, were being used for firewood and hogs and wild animals were disturbing the graves.
As one might imagine, this situation was unacceptable as a permanent solution to the final resting place for the Confederate dead. So, Col. John McGavock, and his wife Carrie, graciously donated about two acres of their farm land at Carnton to be used as a permanent cemetery for the fallen Confederates at Franklin. The challenge now would be getting the hastily buried soldiers on the battlefield moved from where they were originally interred to the new cemetery at Carnton. In an ironic twist of fate, Carnton comes from the Gaelic word ‘Cairn’. It means a “pile of memorial stones” used to honor fallen heroes.
Bids were solicited for the reburial work and a man by the name of George Cuppett, a veteran Confederate soldier with the 8th Texas Cavalry, was awarded the job to rebury the soldier-dead at a price of $5.00 per man. He had a small team helping him, including his brother Marcellus. The burial team worked for about ten weeks, from April until June 1866, reburying the dead. They took great care to keep as many of the men identified as possible.
George Cuppett started a ‘book of the dead’ in which the names and information on each soldier were carefully recorded. The book would be handed over to Carrie McGavock who kept it for over 40 years. Many family members of the soldiers buried at McGavock would correspond with Carrie through the following decades to gain information about their loved ones. For many years after the battle, people would travel from various southern States to Franklin in order to visit their loved-one’s grave and to personally meet Carrie McGavock. Some would return year after year.
One of the sadder stories related to this reburial process is that George Cuppett’s younger brother, Marcellus, who was helping with the reburials, mysteriously died during the reburial project. The McGavocks allowed him to be buried in the same cemetery. He was buried with the Texas soldiers. Marcellus Cuppett is the only civilian buried in McGavock Confederate Cemetery.
The cemetery has remained in private hands since 1866. An annual memorial service is held the first Sunday in June to honor the brave Southern soldiers. A local Boy Scout troop places flags next to each marker to honor their sacrifice.
If you come to Franklin make sure Carnton is on your list of stops. Plan at least one hour for the house tour and an additional 20-40 minutes to walk through the cemetery. This guidebook is a valuable resource for your self-guided tour through the cemetery.
George Cuppett, who led the re-burial project from April to June 1866, recorded the names and identities of about 1,500 Confederate dead. He kept them the book pictured below. The book was passed on to the care of Carrie McGavock, which she kept diligently.
Here the book is opened to the Mississippi section of boys killed at Franklin.
Photos provided for and courtesy of the Carnton Foundation.
The Col. John and Carrie McGavock home – Carnton – was situated less than one mile from the epicenter of the action that took place on the Union Eastern flank at Franklin. Because of close proximity geographically, and the compassion of Carrie McGavock, hundreds of Confederate soldiers were tended and cared for immediately after the battle at Carnton. As many as 300 soldiers found care inside the home and possibly hundreds spread out on the plantation grounds. Confederate surgeons worked tirelessly to save as many boys as possible.
Source: excerpted from the Wikipedia article (authored by Tellinghistory, the owner of this blog site)
Robert Hicks, author of Widow of the South
“The setting for Hicks’ novel is Carnton Plantation, home of the McGavock family. The house was used as a field hospital in the days and weeks after the battle, and though many other homes in the area were used for the same purpose, it was at Carnton that, as legend has it, at least four dead generals were laid out on the back porch during the battle itself, and where the discarded arms and legs of wounded soldiers made a pile that reached as high as a second floor window. More importantly, Carnton was the home of the legendary “Widow of the South.” Rather than let the original battlefield and its shallow graves be plowed over, Carrie and John McGavock donated two acres of land adjacent to their own family cemetery for the reburial of the nearly 1,500 Confederates’ remains. Until the day she died, Carrie McGavock tended to the cemetery, taking care to mark the graves, record the names of the dead, and give some closure to those left behind.”
The Nashville Scene
As Hicks writes, “Those men were the chains that bound the living. They were the missing whose absence shackled the survivors in place, people afraid to move on for fear of being gone for their sudden return. They drew the living back to the war, back to that battlefield over and over and over again, reenacting its rituals and its skirmishes until they all would be dead.”
Visit author Robert Hick’s official web site.
John and Carrie McGavock’s describes the scene at Carnton after the Battle of Franklin.
‘Every room was filled, every bed had two poor, bleeding fellows, every spare space, niche, and corner under the stairs, in the hall, everywhere. And when the noble old house could hold no more, the yard was appropriated until the wounded and dead filled that.’
‘Our doctors were deficient in bandages and [Carrie McGavock] began by giving her old linen, then her towels and napkins, then her sheets and tableclothes, then her husband’s shirts and her own undergarments. … Unaffrighted by the sight of blood, unawed by horrid wounds, unblanched by ghastly death, she walked from room to room, from man to man, her very skirts stained in blood.’
Carnton is open Monday-Saturday 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday 1-5 p.m.
$10 for adults
$9 for seniors
$5 for children 6-12
$3 for grounds tour
Carnton is off Highway 431 (Lewisburg Pike) south of Franklin at 1345 Carnton Lane. For more information, call 615-794-0903.
Randal McGavock (d. 1843) was a prominent local politician, even serving as Mayor of Nashville for a one-year term in 1824. Randal knew President James K. Polk and was good friends with President Andrew Jackson who stayed in the McGavock home on more than one occasion. Jackson gave a rocking chair to the McGavocks and it is one of the several original artifacts or pieces of furniture one can see when touring the home today.
The home was ready for the McGavock family to permanently occupy in the late 1820s. At the time it was 1400 acres of which 500 acres was used for farming. McGavock – in the 1830s – had 250 hogs, cattle and sheep.
Randal died in 1843 leaving his property to two sons, James and John (1815 – 1893). John (pictured right) took possession of the Carnton property. He continued to farm it until his death in 1893. John married Carrie Winder (1829 – 1905), who is famously known as the “Widow of the South” based on Robert Hicks’s novel.
Randal started renovating the home in the late 1840s preferring a Greek revival style to the Federal style it was birthed from. Thus, he added a two-story Greek revival portico and two dormers in the attic. In the 1850s McGavock added a two-story porch on to the rear of the home. It was on this porch that four Confederate Generals’ bodies – Patrick Cleburne, John Adams (Confederate Army officer), Otho F. Strahl and Hiram B. Granbury – were laid out for a few hours of the Battle of Franklin (November 30, 1864).
In December 1848 John married his cousin Carrie Winder of Ducros Plantation House in Thibaudaux, Louisiana. The couple had five children but only two would survive past 1864. McGavock sent his slaves to Alabama in 1862 so in 1864 there were no McGavock slaves present.
Source: excerpted from the Wikipedia article (authored by Tellinghistory, the owner of this blog site)
The famous back porch were the four Confederate Generals were laid out after the Battle of Franklin, the evening of November 30, 1864.
George Cuppett wrote the names and information related to the identity of each soldier in the McGavock cemetery book (Jacobson: McGavock, pp. 39-44). After he finished the re-burials in mid 1866 he turned over the care of the book, and the dead, to the McGavock’s. Wood headboards were replaced with granite markers in 1896 by the John McEweb Bivouac veterans organization. The ongoing responsibility of maintaining the cemetery would fall on to the able and compassionate hands of Carrie McGavock, a labor of love she shouldered until her death in 1905. The original book is on display upstairs in Carnton.
It would fall to the McGavock’s to care for the nearly 1,500 Confederate dead for the remainder of their lives. John died in 1893 and Carrie in 1905. Carrie’s shepherding of the fallen of Franklin lasted 41 years. Rev. John W. Hanner was quoted in The Confederate Veteran magazine praying, mentioning about Carrie in 1905 (CV 30, p. 448):
We thank thee for the . . . feeble knees she lifted up, for the many hearts she comforted, the needy ones she supplied, the sick she ministered unto, and the boys she found in abject want and mothered and reared into worthy manhood. In the last day they will rise up and call her blessed. Today she is not, because thou hast taken her; and we are left to sorrow for the Good Samaritan of Williamson County, a name richly merited by her. (Quoted in Jacobson:McGavock, p. 37)
Time has not been favorable to the identities of the soldiers though. Today 780 Confederate soldiers’ identities are positively identified, leaving some 558 as officially listed as unknown.
Today, the McGavock Confederate Cemetery is the largest privately owned-maintained military cemetery in the United States. The Franklin Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy have maintained the cemetery now since 1905.
Source: excerpted from the Wikipedia article (authored by Tellinghistory, the owner of this blog site)
It was Carrie Winder McGavock, wife of John, who spearheaded the Good Samaritan operation of mercy that last evening of November 1864. She personally supervised the logistics of the effort and sacrificed much food, clothing and supplies to care for the wounded and dying. When she arose to make breakfast in the morning witnesses say her dress was soaked at the bottom with bloodstains. At least 150 Confederate soldiers died the first night at Carnton.
The smell of blood, wounds, infection and death was horrible. The visual scenes must have been indescribable as well. Carries two surviving children, Hattie (age nine) and Winder (age seven) served as medical aides throughout the evening as well.
Source: excerpted from the Wikipedia article (authored by Tellinghistory, the owner of this blog site)
Hattie was just nine years old as she flagged her mother, Carrie, the evening of November 30, 1864, as Carrie – the Good Samaritan of Franklin – tended the wounded and dying Confederate soldiers at Carnton. Carrie’s story is now immortalized in the blockbuster-selling novel by Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South.
Hattie is buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery. She married George Cowan in 1884 when she was 29.
John and Carrie McGavock describe the scene at Carnton after the Battle of Franklin.
‘Every room was filled, every bed had two poor, bleeding fellows, every spare space, niche, and corner under the stairs, in the hall, everywhere. And when the noble old house could hold no more, the yard was appropriated until the wounded and dead filled that.’
‘Our doctors were deficient in bandages and [Carrie McGavock] began by giving her old linen, then her towels and napkins, then her sheets and tableclothes, then her husband’s shirts and her own undergarments. … Unaffrighted by the sight of blood, unawed by horrid wounds, unblanched by ghastly death, she walked from room to room, from man to man, her very skirts stained in blood.’
Carnton is open Monday-Saturday 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday 1-5 p.m.
Visit their web site for more info.
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