BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

Nashville has a plan to preserve Fort Negley Park—one that many hope deals with its violent past.

FROM THE MAY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Fort Negley Park, a 55-acre swath of open space two miles south of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, is most famous as the site of a prominent stone masonry fortification built during the Civil War after Union soldiers seized the city. Built out of earth and dry-stacked limestone, Fort Negley is said to be the largest inland fort constructed during the war. It helped the North retain control of Nashville and eventually win the war.

The structure itself, however, was built by nearly 3,000 African American men and women, who were “impressed” against their will—rounded up on the street or pulled out of church services, some of them as young as 13 years old. A quarter of them died, either from injury or mistreatment. They were buried near the fort, outside the “contraband” camps where the laborers lived. Today, the surrounding neighborhoods are still predominantly African American.

The racial history of Fort Negley gained national attention last year when the city approved a development proposal for 21 acres of the park, which had been purchased in 1928. The parcel in question, in the park’s southeast corner, had been leased to the Nashville Sounds, a minor league baseball team, in the late 1970s. The team built a stadium and a parking lot, but then left Nashville in 2014. The city solicited ideas for the stadium site, despite calls from preservationists, who argued that the parkland should be returned to the public.

In December, an archaeological report commissioned by the city concluded that it was “highly likely” that bodies remained buried within the stadium parcel, and recommended that the land not be developed but be reintegrated with the park. The developer withdrew. Now the city’s Metropolitan Board of Parks and Recreation has commissioned a cultural landscape report for the area. It plans to demolish the stadium and develop a program that will preserve and honor the site’s history.

Among the ideas for the park is a land bridge to nearby historic sites, including Nashville’s 8th Avenue Reservoir. Image courtesy Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, The Cultural Landscape Foundation. 

The turn of events is a win not just for preservationists but for Nashville at large, and particularly its African American community. Fort Negley Park, and south Nashville in general, are representative of the kind of discriminatory planning practices that were pervasive in American cities in the 20th century.

“It’s a classic story of the freeway cutting off a part of the city,” says Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, the president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which included Fort Negley Park in its 2017 Landslide, an annual list of landscapes under threat. “What’s wonderful now is there’s really this exceptional opportunity to put the park back together again.”

That opportunity reaches beyond the park’s borders. There are two other hilltop sites—both now parks—within a half mile of Fort Negley that held Civil War-era fortifications. “One of the things that we’re talking about is looking at these as a family or a network of community parks,” says Tim Netsch, the assistant director of planning and facilities development at Metro Parks.

That the parks are separated by I-65 is an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past, says Birnbaum, who has been thinking about how to link the sites. “This is not just about bricks and mortar,” he says. “It’s about how the park gets knit back into the larger cityscape in a way that heals those wounds.”

Timothy A. Schuler, editor of NOW, can be reached at timothyaschuler@gmail.com and on Twitter @Timothy_Schuler.