Metro Pulse/Secret History/Rampart Streets

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The unheralded disappearance of Fort Sanders

by Jack Neely

Fort Sanders may be the most popular proper name in greater Knoxville. It's the name of the most densely populated neighborhood in East Tennessee, and the name of the area's largest hospital chain; the multi-county Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center is the main reason that businesses named Fort Sanders occupy nearly a full page of the phone book. They're all named for one real Union fort. Exactly what happened to the original Fort Sanders, and when, is a puzzle.

Fort Sanders was the biggest of several earthen fortifications around the railroad city of Knoxville. Begun early in the Civil War by the occupying Confederates, it later became the area's chief U.S. fort. About 35,000 square feet in size, it included three triangular bastions facing the south, north, and, most importantly, west, at the crest of the ridge along what's now 17th Street.

It had been known as "Fort Loudon," but in the thick of the siege, General Ambrose Burnside chose to rename it for William Sanders, the popular young commander mortally wounded days before. Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, anxious about Union reinforcements, opted to finish the costly siege with a bold, or desperate, coup de grace: he launched a direct assault of 4,000 troops on the fort, on a cold Sunday morning 140 years ago this weekend. It was one of the war's shortest battles. During a horrifying 20 minutes, a Confederate soldier was killed or wounded every two seconds. When it was over, almost 600 lay bleeding on the slopes up to the earthen citadel. The Confederates gave up on Knoxville, which some declared the best-fortified city in the nation.

After the war, like a tidy hostess cleaning up after a party that got out of hand, Knoxville swept away most of the existing earthen forts that ringed the city: Fort Comstock, Fort Byington, Fort Hill. They left the biggest one alone. In the years after the war, Fort Sanders became something of a tourist attraction, the sort of thing Knoxvillians liked to show their houseguests from up north.

In detailed bird's-eye maps of Knoxville in 1886 and 1889, it's still there, and large, occupying what looks like at least two city blocks on the undeveloped western fringe of a stylish Victorian neighborhood then known as "West Knoxville" or "West End." A road called "Fort Sanders Ave." leads up toward it from Cumberland. The earthworks' details are still sharply defined and look like they're ready to withstand another massive assault from the insurgents of the day: socialists, perhaps, or temperance ladies.

Though the neighborhood was developing rapidly, the large southwestern quarter of Fort Sanders west of 17th, between Cumberland and Highland remained undeveloped through the 1890s, an odd blank patch on maps of the growing city. The now-forested battlefield inspired earnest efforts to preserve Fort Sanders and its environs as a military park. Perhaps spurred by local military activity—Knoxville hosted a major army training base during the Spanish-American War—there was talk of somehow recommissioning Fort Sanders as an active military base. The Fort Sanders Presbyterian Church, built on Laurel Avenue near the ramparts just before that foreign war, welcomed the young troops.

Just after the war, in late 1898, Mayor William Rule, a former Union officer himself, described the remains as they were 35 years after the battle:

"A street runs through the center of the fort, with three or four residences upon it, which would be available as quarters for officers. The long slope on the west and north, up which the Confederates made such a gallant charge, is still open country, and the line of the fort is well preserved."

Rule lived on Clinch, near the ramparts. He offered an eloquent proposal. "By the natural growth of the city of Knoxville, all of this long slope, containing nearly 80 acres of land, will be covered with residences should not the government of the United States soon take action. It would be entirely appropriate for the government to commemorate the storming of Fort Sanders, for here was fought one of the most determined and important battles of the war, and East Tennessee should have a monument which should speak for all time of a completely reunited country."

Others were enthusiastic about the idea, too, but in Knoxville, bet on the developers. Preservationists' dreams clashed with the stylish neighborhood's skyrocketing realty prices. Land along this ridge was selling for several hundred times what it had before the war. Several of the early Fort Sanders homesteaders were former Confederates; it was as if they were determined to conquer with money what they couldn't with artillery. Confederate veteran George Wesley Pickle was one of the first to build within the walls of old Fort Sanders, in 1899. He called his home "Fort Sanders Hall." The old ramparts would have been visible from some of the house's western windows. (Later better known as the Pickle Mansion, it burned this past summer.)

Historian Steve Cotham speculates that the earthworks began to surrender around 1903, when UT professor of mathematics and former Confederate officer W.W. Carson built his handsome brick house on the corner of Clinch and 17th, on a lot that must have called for a leveling of some of the fort. The corner house, now known as the Ronald McDonald House, established this rebel on the crest of this hill more successfully here than Longstreet's men had 40 years earlier.

Within a decade, Laurel and Clinch pushed west past 17th Street, laying claim to the region Rule hoped would be a military park. But when Laurel Ave. went through, it didn't follow the top of the ridge; it dog-legged to the north. Did it deviate from its course to skirt the remains of a fort?

If we can trust James Agee, some part of Fort Sanders was still there in 1916, the setting for his autobiographical novel, A Death In the Family, as an overgrown ruin. Near the end of the novel, Rufus and his uncle Andrew seek solitude in the ruins, "standing at the edge of Fort Sanders and looking out across the waste of briers and embanked clay...."

Agee's description may be our last record of Fort Sanders. Sometime after that, Fort Sanders' last vestiges quietly disappeared. If any newspaper ran an article about Fort Sanders' final capitulation, it escaped the encyclopedic files at the McClung Collection.

Ironically, Fort Sanders, the phrase, gained currency only as Fort Sanders, the fort, vanished—especially after the 1920 establishment of Fort Sanders Hospital, a block or two west of the old ramparts. Fort Sanders Manor, a good-sized apartment building, went up within the fort's boundaries in 1922. West End became better known as Fort Sanders 30 or 40 years after that.

Several elderly Fort-Sanders-area residents don't remember any ruins here. Dr. Digby Seymour, author of the comprehensive history Divided Loyalties and the ranking authority on the Civil War in Knoxville, has explored more-obscure trenchwork all over the region. He grew up in the neighborhood in the 1920s and '30s.

"We didn't know what Fort Sanders was," he says. "I never heard anybody talk about it at all. We always sledded down 17th Street. If it was still there, I would have noticed it."

In this dense, highly developed neighborhood, it's odd that one choice lot on 17th at Laurel remained vacant as late as 1930. That spot is, as close as we can figure, the western rampart of Fort Sanders, the epicenter of the battle.

Martin Hunt, who also grew up near here about the same time Seymour did, remembers it as a weedy lot with small trees. It was unappealing even to kids, and he says they avoided it. He doesn't remember any unusual slopes there.

Sometime in the '30s, the Laurel Avenue Church of Christ built a Sunday School building on the lot. Later, in the early 1970s, Valley Fidelity Bank built a branch there.

By then, Fort Sanders, the fort, was long gone. But Fort Sanders, the name, had never been more popular.