I was down in Knoxville this evening and picked up an issue of Metro Pulse, a weekly paper on life in and around the city. There was an interesting story on an effort to preserve a site associated with Longstreet’s unsuccessful attempt to take the city in the fall of 1863. Here’s an online version if you’d like to have a look for yourself.
The spot in question is a wooded area on the south side of the Tennessee River, just a stone’s throw from downtown and very close to some extant Union fortifications that you can see in this aerial image from Wikimapia. Hopefully the plan to preserve all these sites and combine them into one historic/natural “greenway” will work out. Having a nice chunk of green space and a few Civil War forts just a mile from the center of a city sounds like a pretty sweet deal, especially since all those important works north of the river are gone.
While I’m at it, let me recommend the work of Jack Neely, who wrote the news story and has a regular column for the Pulse on little-known aspects of Knoxville’s history. You can read these short essays here, or in two collected volumes here and here.
Past in the Present 
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