Existing comment:
The Nashville City Cemetery:
Located just below, at the base of St. Cloud Hill, the Nashville City Cemetery became a burial ground for thousands of soldiers, Union and Confederate, who died during the war.
Opened in 1822, the original four-acre tract grew to twenty-seven acres with 11,000 burials including free blacks and slaves by the mid-1850s. Such prominent Nashvillians as the city's founder, James Robertson, and Henry and Septima Middleton Rutledge, both children of signers of the Declaration of Independence, are buried in the cemetery.
Under contract from the army, caretaker W.R. Cornelius buried the remains of over 15,000 Union and Confederate soldiers in the City Cemetery. Cornelius kept detailed records of name, rank, and company, marking each grave with a wooden headstone. As the war dragged on, the headstones gradually disappeared. In 1867, the Union dead were removed to the National Cemetery on Gallatin Pike. Many of the Confederate dead were reburied at Mt. Olivet Cemetery on Lebanon Pike. |