Parker's Crossroads, Tennessee

Parker's Crossroads is a small Henderson County town whose name carries a decisive moment from the Civil War. On December thirty-first, eighteen sixty-two, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest had just spent two weeks cutting Union supply lines across West Tennessee when he found himself caught in a trap here. Union forces under Colonel Cyrus Dunham had him pinned from the south.

Then a second Union brigade arrived unexpectedly from the north, firing into Forrest's rear. Forrest shouted his famous order: charge them both ways. His cavalry broke through two directions simultaneously and escaped across the Tennessee River, though he lost a few hundred men, many of them captured.

Both sides claimed victory, but Forrest's audacity that day at this crossroads became part of the legend that made him one of the most studied and most controversial commanders of the war.