Metro Pulse/Secret History/The View from the Fort

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The earthy heritage of South Knoxville's citadel

by Jack Neely

The sign is in black marker on felt, thumbtacked to a tall hardwood tree high on a steep, lush hill in South Knoxville: "This Is God's Land. In His Holy Name We Claim it. Please Do Not Defile it."

Tall trees—oaks, pines, maples, many of them slowly succumbing to thick legions of kudzu—block most of the views except for one perfect vista of the Chapman Highway Ruby Tuesday. It seems very far away.

Nearby, you could hardly help but notice, are some steep mounds of earth. Taken together, they form an oblong polygon that crowns the summit. The enclosed area is not a big space, about the size of a back yard.

Today, it's quiet. Your only company up here is a couple of crows, and, sitting in a car, a chubby middle-aged man who averts his eyes when you look at him. But there were days, long ago, when this dirt was fresh, that the explosions were deafening.

Fort Dickerson was one of a constellation of 17 forts and batteries that in 1863 encircled the Union-held city in a protective ring. Overlooking the city and effectively protecting it from the south, Dickerson was the most formidable of four Union forts on the heights south of the river. The fort got its name from an otherwise obscure Union officer from Illinois, Capt. Jonathan Dickerson, who died in a skirmish near Cleveland, Tenn., a few weeks before the siege of Knoxville. He probably never saw this hill. Gen. Ambrose Burnside named all of his forts after Union officers fallen in the East Tennessee campaign; Capt. Dickerson's the one he was thinking about the day they established a fort up here.

It's one of the highest points within range of downtown Knoxville; the army that commanded these heights could nearly command the city. Dug into these earthworks was an artillery group from Illinois known as Renwick's Elgin Battery.

There's a full account of South Knoxville's skirmishes in chapter 18 of Digby Seymour's fine book, Divided Loyalties. In the early days of the Confederate siege of Knoxville, 5,000 Confederate cavalrymen, having successfully occupied Maryville, were advancing north under the command of one of the Confederacy's boldest and brightest young commanders, 27-year-old Brigadier General Joseph "Fightin' Joe" Wheeler. After crossing into Knox County, Wheeler's men, including a contingent of Terry's Texas Rangers, overwhelmed the green Union recruits Gen. William Sanders sent out to engage them, capturing 140 and sending the rest fleeing back into town. Wheeler's advance stopped only when they came within artillery range of Fort Dickerson. The six cannons of Renwick's Battery opened up on the Confederate invaders, halting their advance. Wheeler hoped to take Fort Dickerson the following day, but the delay gave Sanders a chance to reinforce it. Discouraged, Wheeler gave up on it, and with it hope of conquering Knoxville from the south. His commanding officer, Gen. James Longstreet, concentrated his efforts on the west, and Kingston Pike, where, a few days later, Gen. Sanders would fall, giving Burnside another name for another fort.

The well-placed Union forts held. Longstreet gave up the Confederate siege of Knoxville and retreated. Gen. William T. Sherman arrived in town and declared Knoxville the best-fortified city he'd ever seen. Knoxville was, for a moment, famous for its impregnability.

But after the war, developers gobbled the old Union forts up like pork rinds. Almost all of them yielded to building and road projects: Fort Hill, Battery Noble, Fort Comstock, and Battery Wiltsie vanished without traces. Knoxville was eager to put the war behind it. UT organized campaigns to deliberately erase the signs of war from its campus. Even Fort Sanders, site of the biggest battle for Knoxville, vanished.

Fort Dickerson remained mainly because no one thought to do anything else with it. Fort Dickerson's weird remoteness, near downtown but punishingly steep, protected it from a Confederate assault in 1863 and from commercial development in the years since. In 1936, the South Knoxville Civic Club led an effort to preserve it and make it accessible by road.

Exactly 139 springs worth of rain and summers worth of storms have descended on Fort Dickerson since Renwick's guns were up here, but somehow the work of Union shovels is still discernible in the topography. In the winter, you can make out the irregular battlements from Main Street, less than a mile away.

It's an excellent place for a fort, but maybe not such a perfect place for a city park, on top of a steep hill with a dead-end driveway leading to it, and there are rumors that that status isn't permanent. Its remoteness appeals to people who prefer not to be seen. A few steps away from that thumbtacked plea in felt is a broken beer bottle; a few steps further, a condom wrapper. Fort Dickerson has a shady reputation, which is why some in the city have been trying to clear out its underbrush, and why, in the interest of finding the "highest and best use" for the property, they're also entertaining proposals to develop parts of this small mountain privately. (See Betty Bean's Citybeat in this issue.) Some interests are as ambitious about Fort Dickerson as Fightin' Joe was in 1863.

Right now, they're just proposals. But many expect that, in the next year or two, this old battlefield may see more action than it has seen in a long time.