In November 1863, the Civil War had been ravaging the United States for two years, and some civilians in Knoxville were jumping into the trenches to fight alongside Union soldiers while others went to meet the incoming Confederates.
More battles were fought in Tennessee than any other state except for Virginia, and the whole nation had its eyes on the Volunteer State.
Until this moment, the Confederate Army had left Knoxville undefended to reinforce efforts in Chattanooga, which allowed Major General Ambrose E. Burnside of the Union Army to march his soldiers in from Kentucky and take Knoxville without a fight.
In the icy and frigid late November weather, the Confederate soldiers returned to reclaim the city.
“There was a morning—at dawn—attack,” says Joan Markel, former McClung Museum Civil War curator. “Confederates against Fort Sanders and it was over in 20 minutes. It was a total bloodbath.”
The Confederate Army lost 813 men in the Battle of Fort Sanders, which took place on and around present-day campus.
WHERE THE PAST AND PRESENT COLLIDE
Fast forward 161 years and much has changed in Knoxville. Yet whispers of the war linger, specifically on the grounds of UT.
In spring 2024, a team of archaeology students wearing yellow hard hats and bright orange safety vests dug into exposed earth in an area of campus that used to be a parking lot as part of a hands-on field school. Thirty minutes into their excavation, the 161 years between them and the soldiers who fought and died vanished when they found a Civil War-era bullet called a Minié ball.
Both Union and Confederate trenches stretched across campus. In 2009, excavations at the site of Sorority Village revealed a Confederate trench. The Union trenches stretched from the river through campus to Fort Sanders, with a second trench connecting Fort Sanders to the Hill.
“I grew up on campus,” says Knox Tabor, a sophomore studying anthropology who participated in the spring dig. “I’ve known this area forever. Learning that these things happened—there was a whole battle, the Siege of Knoxville—was crazy.”
The excavation site, on the corner of Volunteer and Lake Loudoun Boulevards near Circle Park, will soon be a new residence hall, due to open in fall 2025. To preserve history, Tennessee law states that excavation must take place on any state property set for construction. The requirement gave Associate Professor Kandace Hollenbach and PhD student Will Joseph the perfect opportunity to offer a hands-on learning experience to archaeology students.
“It kind of gets you geared into thinking about archaeology and prehistory, not as something in some far-off exotic place but as something that’s occurring right here in Knoxville, in Tennessee, on your own campus,” Joseph says.
The field school uncovered artifacts not only from the Civil War but also from the wealthy families that lived on the land that is now a part of campus.
Not far from the site of the new residence hall in the courtyard between Hess and Melrose Halls once stood the Melrose mansion, which was built in 1858 and torn down in the 1940s to make way for the current Melrose Hall.
At an excavation site in the courtyard between Melrose and Hess Halls, the archaeology students used ground-penetrating radar and uncovered a cistern and an electrical box plate from the mansion.
“Most field schools you have to go away, and there’s the cost of getting there, the cost of room and board,” Hollenbach explains. “But being able to do it on campus—most students already have housing in place, they don’t have an additional travel cost, and if they have a job in the evenings or weekends, they can keep it.”
Current UT students were not the only ones digging up the past. Several anthropology alumni returned to campus as professionals, working with Tracy Jenkins, a staff archaeologist at Cultural Resource Analysts Inc. Jenkins and his team investigated the trench and post-Civil War house sites near Circle Park before Hollenbach’s students began their field school.
Jenkins says the team recovered pottery, glass bottles that once contained patent medicines, and fragments of porcelain dolls, among other items.
“[This is] probably one of the best collections I’ve worked on since I started doing archaeology,” Jenkins says. “Just because of the level of detailed information you can get about these artifacts and the breadth of different types of artifacts we have.”
Jenkins worked closely with Hollenbach and Joseph, who say the excavations were a valuable opportunity for UT students to get hands-on experience before they enter the workforce
“With a bachelor’s degree and with a field school on their CV, they can get hired by any of these archaeological firms such as CRA,” Hollenbach explains. “It makes them very employable right away for some of these field tech position jobs.”