PASTS REMEMBERED--Trip 2

"That's tobacco," said Andy, as we followed Route #79 west.
"They still make cigarettes, so somebody has got to grow tobacco," I told him. The deep green leaves swayed gently in a slight morning breeze. We passed Fort Campbell Military Reservation, marked by long stretches of page fencing with quintuple rows of barbed wire at the top and signs that read, "U.S. Military Reservation No Trespassing." It looked menacing. Oddly though, the fence only lined the highway. Andy noticed too. "It doesn't enclose anything," I said. "Every section that starts and stops is open on both ends. How dumb is that!"
"Maybe they ran out of money," he joked, "or the rest has sensors buried underground."
"Sure," I added, "or it's a government toilet seat project!"
Brightly colored fall leaves lined the roads.
"It's all hardwoods and cedars here," said Andy. "I haven't seen any pines."
We watched the movie at Fort Donelson Visitor Center and learned about the first major win for the Union in the Civil War in February of 1862 and the friendship between Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate third in command Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner. The battle itself was not so significant as some of the others in the five-year fight, but what it did was amazingly significant as the first major victory for the North, which split the Confederacy in half. It exposed Nashville, the Capitol of Tennessee, and gave the North control of rivers and railroad lines. The North had found a General who wouldn't hesitate. Donelson marked a turning point.
The Confederate Monument at Auto Tour Stop #1 commemorates southern soldiers who fought and died at Fort Donelson. Confederate soldiers and slaves had built the earthen fort ten feet high over a period of seven months in 1862, in order to protect the Cumberland River batteries from land attack. Soldiers and slaves lived in more than 400 log huts as winter quarters while they worked on the construction. This was luxury with a canvas roof and a fireplace. In addition to government rations of flour, fresh and cured meat, sugar and coffee, every boat brought boxes from home. Off-duty soldiers hunted and fished in the local woods and streams.
At Stop #4, heavy seacoast artillery defended the Cumberland River, the water approach to major supply bases in Clarksville and Nashville. Here on February 14, 1862, untested Confederate gunners defeated Flag Officer Andrew Foote's flotilla of ironclad and timberclad gunboats. The slow-moving vessels made easy targets. Foote had overestimated the abilities of the ironclads after using them successfully against Fort Heiman and Fort Henry.

In the meantime, Grant's army surrounded Fort Donelson. Grant correctly concluded that when the Confederates attacked hard on the right, they weakened their line somewhere else. Seizing the initiative, he told Brigadier General C.F. Smith to "take the fort." The ridge at Stop #6 marked Smith's success in capturing the earthworks.
The Forge Road, Stop #9, explained how the Confederate forces of Brigadier General Gideon J. Pillow and General Albert Sidney Johnston's divisions along with Colonel Nathan B. Forrest's cavalry secured an escape route for the Confederates at daybreak on February 15, but due to indecision and confusion among the commanders, the troops were ordered to return to their entrenchments. Union soldiers reoccupied the area. "In this age of instant communication it's so easy to forget that news didn't always travel fast," I told Andy. That night the Confederate leaders met at the Rice House, a block from the Dover Hotel, in war council to discuss strategy. Pillow and General John B. Floyd turned over command to Buckner and fled to Nashville.
Buckner surrendered to Grant at the Dover Hotel on the morning of February 16, 1862. He turned over the Confederate forces of Fort Donelson in a momentous move that changed the course of the western stage of the Civil War. When Buckner wrote his decision to surrender, Grant responded, "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted." According to most sources, Buckner was eating breakfast when Grant arrived at the hotel, and he told Grant the terms were "ungenerous and unchivalrous." Today, the Dover Hotel, built between 1851 and 1853 to accommodate riverboat travelers and the site of the famous meeting, stands alone as the only original existing structure where a major Civil War surrender took place.
Our final Stop #11 was the National Cemetery that included graves of 512 unidentified soldiers. The large number was attributed to haste in cleaning up the battlefield and to the fact that Civil War soldiers did not carry government issued identification.

In spite of 2,832 Union soldiers and 1,492 Confederate soldiers killed, wounded or missing and 13,000 Confederate prisoners of war sent to POW camps in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Boston, the Battle of Fort Donelson is sometimes overlooked in significance. But it opened the heartland of the Confederacy and allowed Federal forces to press on until the Union became a fact once again.

The route number changed from 120 to 139 when we crossed the state line from Tennessee to Kentucky, and the wooded terrain turned to family farms of corn fields, sweet potatoes and tobacco. Barns, decorated with colored quilts of wood, graced the hillsides, and yellow roadside signs warned to beware of horse-drawn carriages. It suggested we had entered Amish or Mennonite country. Later we saw a sign that said "Shaker."
The tiny town of Fairview, Kentucky, boasted what was the world's tallest obelisk in 1917.
The 351-foot spire on a foundation of Kentucky limestone paid tribute to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, born on the site June 3, 1808. Described as a "reluctant secessionist," Davis, a West Point graduate, had been Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce.
Next we headed for Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.
Beautifully rolling, the Kentucky countryside stretched before us in rich fall colors--gold fields of grain, green and yellow sweet potato patches, brown corn shalks, lush green meadows, nature's palette of painted trees.
The tombstones of Little Hope cemetery, some leaning over and cracked, reflected the age of its occupants.
In February of 1925, amateur caver Floyd Collins died in Sand Cave when the cave collapsed. A massive 12-day effort to tunnel a shaft to him attracted national attention. We hiked in the short boardwalk trail, a path taken by hundreds who came to watch the drama unfold. Described as a circus, the rescue effort brought people from all over the country with picnic lunches and kids in tow, but Collins didn't survive long enough to be rescued alive. Regardless, the publicity drew attention to Mammoth Cave, promoting its establishment as a national park with land purchases starting in 1926.