Cherry Mansion: Grant's Headquarters Before the Storm

The oldest house in Savannah, Tennessee, stands above the Tennessee River on a bluff that offered its owners both a view and a vulnerability. William Henry Cherry and his family were Unionists in a state that had gone Confederate, and in the spring of eighteen sixty-two they opened their brick Federal-style home to the Union Army. They could not have guessed how consequential a decision that would be.

The house was built around eighteen thirty, its bricks made by hand from clay dug out of the riverbank. A Greek Revival addition gave it more presence. It was substantial for the region, the kind of home that signaled prosperity and standing, and Union General Charles F. Smith recognized it immediately as a headquarters worth having when he arrived in March of eighteen sixty-two.

Smith used Cherry Mansion as his command post as the Army of the Tennessee massed for the push south. He was followed by Ulysses S. Grant, whose forces were staging for what would become one of the bloodiest battles of the war. On the morning of April sixth, eighteen sixty-two, Grant was eating breakfast at the Cherry Mansion table when he heard artillery rumbling from the direction of Pittsburg Landing, nine miles south. The Battle of Shiloh had begun without warning. Grant left immediately.

Two Union generals died at Cherry Mansion. Charles F. Smith succumbed to an infected leg wound on April twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-two, never recovering from an injury he suffered stepping into a rowboat. W. H. L. Wallace, shot through the head at Shiloh, was carried back to the house and died there on April tenth. Annie Cherry and other Savannah women nursed wounded soldiers of both armies in the house and on its grounds.

The mansion still stands, privately owned and largely unchanged from the morning Grant heard the guns.