While laying the foundation for a new Nashville building, a developer discovered human bones that might be two centuries old. The site is next to a Civil War fort and an 1822 cemetery.
The discovery for Nashville represents the most recent meeting point of the city’s economic boom times and its rich and occasionally turbulent history, where new amenities spring up on or close to areas where people once settled, fought, or toiled, then died and were buried, frequently with little documentation of their final resting places.
AJ Capital Management said in a court petition earlier this month that the finding took place when the firm was working on its mixed-use Nashville Warehouse Co. development, which would feature residential units and commercial space, in the area close to Fort Negley.
The fort, constructed by fugitive slaves and liberated Black people for the Union, has become a flashpoint in Nashville’s protracted transition from a major Confederate metropolis to a thriving, contemporary city attempting to manage fast expansion.
It is located in an area that is gradually gentrifying and is home to shops, bars, and restaurants approximately half a mile away from the multi-building project that is only halfway finished and is surrounded by a huge guitar sign and a construction crane.
The corporation is requesting authorization from a chancery court in Nashville to transfer the skeleton bits and thin wood pieces—possibly from coffins—to the nearby, 200-year-old Nashville City Cemetery.
The bones, which were not of Native American origin and were “assessed to date to the early nineteenth century,” according to an archaeologist hired by the corporation, were found in May and again in June. This may have dated the remains before the Civil War.
The bones were only discovered in two of the 53 4-by-6-foot excavations that were carried out to work on the foundation, the archaeologist noted, indicating that they are probably “isolated graves and not a broader cemetery distribution.”
Give or take a few feet, both were discovered at a depth of about 15 feet. The county medical examiner’s office, neighbourhood police, and state archaeological authorities were informed.
According to the archaeologist’s report, a piece of each grave and the bones was uncovered and left in its original location.
When contacted for more remarks, an AJ Capital spokeswoman remained silent.
Learotha Williams, a professor of African-American, Civil War, and Reconstruction history at Tennessee State University, says that it is unclear who these perhaps centuries-old individuals may have been.
Although it seems less likely given that there was evidence of coffins, he said, and that was a level of respect not typically accorded to Black people at the time, he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the remains were those of Native Americans, early settlers, Civil War soldiers, or Black workers on the fort.
In order to analyse the location where the remains were discovered, Williams stated he would feel “a whole lot more comfortable having maybe an academic unit come in.”
He talked about Nashville’s “spotty record” of resolving conflicts between development and preservation of the city’s history.
Williams acknowledged that there has been “some change,” but added that Nashville still has “a ways to go” in terms of sensitivity to the histories of underrepresented groups.
Most notably, a plan to develop the area directly adjacent to Fort Negley several years ago attracted enough attention that it was abandoned as a result of the discovery that the lands below were probably burial grounds.
Developers had intended to build a housing and entertainment complex next to the fort on the site of Nashville’s old minor league baseball stadium.
After growing opposition, the city commissioned an archaeological study that, in January 2018, found that there are probably still human remains buried there, possibly belonging to slaves who built the fort.
The plans were scrapped, and the city instead envisioned a park honouring the fort and the those compelled to construct it.
The baseball stadium was dismantled by the city, and meetings for the renovation have been held in the public.
This summer, a master plan’s final draught is anticipated to be made public.
The Union removed more than 2,700 fugitive slaves and liberated Black people from their homes and churches when Confederate troops surrendered to Union soldiers in Nashville in 1862, forcing them to labour on the fort where they resided in “contraband camps.”
Few of them received the payment they were promised for their work. 600 to 800 of them perished.
Over time, the fort deteriorated. It was restored in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration, and it reopened in 1938, but the fort soon fell into disrepair once again.
According to the late author Robert Hicks, separate softball fields were eventually constructed close by and the Ku Klux Klan held rallies there during the Jim Crow era.
The new construction, across a set of railroad tracks from the location of the baseball stadium, is farther from the fort where the remains were discovered this year.