WKRN has a story about a proposed development around Fort Negley:

On Tuesday, we heard from a developer who has big plans for the empty property: a multi-purpose complex called Nashville Adventure Park. The proposal includes senior living, luxury apartments, townhomes, affordable housing, a farmer’s market at the stadium, artisan retail and studios, restaurants, a hotel, and a wide variety of sports offerings.

If you imagine the hill that the main part of the fort sits on as an egg yolk, this development would be like the egg white, seeming to completely surround the fort, except for where the Adventure Science Center sits.

In other words, the old Catholic Cemetery and the large City Cemetery annexes that the Union opened during the Civil War would all be gone. And, fine, they’re supposed to be empty anyway, but if I were a developer, I’d put a line in my budget for dead parts removal.

More disturbingly and more tragically, this development sits on the site of the contraband camp, the home of thousands of black refugees during the Civil War. As Zada Law pointed out two years ago, there’s been virtually no archaeology done at any contraband camp in Tennessee.

We’ve already irretrievably lost whatever was under the Adventure Science Center, but a lot remains relatively undisturbed. Even the parts under the parking lot are just under a parking lot. We have not yet screwed up a crucial bit of Nashville’s African American history, even if we haven’t bothered to explore it like we should. But if we let developers have it, then that history will be lost. Sure, some archaeologists could come in and do history triage to try to learn as much as they could before it’s torn up, but the Civil War isn’t that far down in the ground. We will lose it.

And frankly, how much more of our Civil War history do we have to lose? We already put I-440 on top of the Confederate line and built a city on the battlefield. One of the most important battles of the Civil War and we let Franklin and Murfreesboro be the tourist destinations while we metaphorically kick the rug over what’s left of our Civil War sites.

Shame on us if we let this development happen. Shame on us if we knowingly let this history slip away.