Stones River National Battlefield

Stones River National Battlefield preserves a compressed landscape of high-intensity Civil War combat and the later politics of memory. The 570-acre park marks the fields where Union and Confederate forces clashed from December 31, 1862, to January 2, 1863, in a fight that ended in a strategic Union victory with significant consequences for control of Middle Tennessee. For those interested in artillery and battlefield engineering, the site includes the ground where massed Union guns on January 2 shattered a Confederate assault, later commemorated by a 31-foot obelisk erected in 1906 by the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway. Preservation history is unusually visible here: the battlefield owes its survival to a late-19th-century advocacy group, early railroad promotion, and a 1927 act of Congress that formalized it as a national military park. Within the boundaries lies Stones River National Cemetery, with thousands of Civil War dead and the Hazen Brigade Monument, regarded as the oldest surviving Civil War monument still in its original location—an important point of reference for anyone studying how Americans began marking the war even before it ended.