Clarksville

Home Town of Wilma Rudolph

Which we learned when we arrived. Also, it is the 5th largest city in Tennessee. We stopped here to…

Visit 1 new National Park Site:

• Fort Donelson National Battlefield (#317), where the Union Victory, over 2 days of battle, February 14-16, 1862, opened the heartland of the Confederacy, as the South was forced to give up southern Kentucky and much of Middle and West Tennessee. Ensuring defeat, the 2 highest ranking Confederate Generals (John Floyd & Gideon Pillow, with no military experience) slipped away late on the 15th, as did Lt. Colonel Nathan Bedford Forest, leaving Simon Buckner in charge. Buckner was an old West Point and Mexican War friend of Grant’s (who reconciled 20 years after the war and was a pallbearer for Grant.) Approximately 12,000 to 14,000 Confederate soldiers were taken prisoner and sent north on river boats. It was here, that General Ulysses S. Grant wrote to General Buckner, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” and got the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant”.
  
  We stopped in the Visitor Center, drove the tour road through the fort, to other battle sites, to the Dover Hotel / Surrender House, and on to the Fort Donelson National Cemetery.

Visits to other parks:

We also visited a State Historic Park & National Recreation Area (not NPS):

• We spent a couple of hours at Port Royale State Historic Park, site of a historic tobacco town, established in 1797, with a tobacco inspection point and flatboat yard, which relied on dark fired tobacco as currency and saw flatboats leave down the Red River to New Orleans by the dozens every year. It is now also part of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. We walked around the town site, visited the General Store/Visitor Center (where people on the Trail of Tears got supplies), and walked a bit on a section of the original, northern Trail of Tears.

• We spent an afternoon driving the Trace Road north 40+ miles through The Land Between the Lakes NRA, from the South Entrance in Tennessee into Kentucky and out the North Entrance. It was previously known as the Land Between the Rivers, a rural landscape of small towns, farms, and early iron industry, bordered by the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.  Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley were created by the TVA by impounding the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and it was designated it as a national recreation area in 1963, transforming it from a flood-prone rural area into a massive outdoor recreation destination. We stopped along the way, spending most of our time at the Golden Pond Visitor Center, Planetarium and Observatory (even seeing a Planatarium show), and at the Elk & Bison Prairie, where we saw about half of each herd, being there just before dusk!

And a visit to downtown Clarksville

We walked around town a bit, visited the old Custom House, now Town Museum, had a nice lunch at Strawberry Alley Ale Works in an old clothing factory, and took a short walk along the Cumberland River on the McGregor Park Riverwalk, stopping in the As the River Flows Museum.

Almost to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky!

After a 3 hour stop, enroute, to visit the National Corvette Museum! How could we not, when it was right on the way.

PREVIOUS Traveling Where Now? . . . . . NEXT Traveling Where Now?