Carnton: Blood and Burial at Franklin

Southeast of downtown Franklin, Tennessee, a Federal-style mansion called Carnton sits at the edge of the old battlefield, and it carries the weight of what happened here on November thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four.

Carnton was built in eighteen twenty-six by Randal McGavock, a former mayor of Nashville, and it had passed by the time of the Civil War to his son John and daughter-in-law Carrie. On that November evening, Confederate General John Bell Hood ordered nearly twenty thousand men to charge two miles of open ground against entrenched Union positions. The assault was catastrophic. When the fighting stopped after five hours of close combat, roughly eighty-five hundred men had become casualties. Confederate dead and wounded poured into the surrounding farmsteads, and the largest concentration came to Carnton.

Several hundred wounded soldiers crowded the house and grounds. The McGavocks, including their children Hattie, age nine, and Winder, age seven, moved through the rooms alongside surgeons doing what they could. The children's bedroom became an operating room. One hundred fifty men died at Carnton that first night alone. The bodies of four Confederate generals, Patrick Cleburne, Hiram Granbury, Otho Strahl, and John Adams, were laid out on the back porch, awaiting removal to their burial places.

In the spring of eighteen sixty-six, with Confederate graves scattered across the Franklin battlefield in deteriorating condition, John McGavock designated two acres of his land as a permanent cemetery. He and Carrie reinterred nearly fifteen hundred Confederate soldiers there, organized by state, and maintained the grounds for the rest of their lives. It became the largest privately owned military cemetery in the United States. Carnton and the McGavock Confederate Cemetery are preserved today by the Battle of Franklin Trust and open to visitors.