Carnton

Carnton is the house that became a hospital and never stopped being one. Randal McGavock built the Greek Revival plantation in 1826; his son John ran it with 44 enslaved people and 700 acres. On the evening of November 30, 1864, the Confederate Army of Tennessee made its frontal assault on Franklin — larger than Pickett's Charge, fought mostly in the dark, 9,500 casualties in five hours, nearly 7,000 of them Southern — and Carnton became the largest field hospital in the area. The McGavocks' children's bedroom became an operating room; the bloodstains are still in the floors.

The morning after, four Confederate generals — Cleburne, Granbury, Adams, Strahl — lay dead on the back porch, and 150 men had died in the house that first night. In 1866 John and Carrie McGavock gave two acres beside their family cemetery for the reburial of nearly 1,500 Confederate dead whose wooden battlefield markers were fading — the largest privately owned military cemetery in the nation, tended by the family until their deaths.

The legend keeps its register — Carrie McGavock, 'the Widow of the South,' reportedly still tending the wounded; soldiers in the rooms where the surgeons worked; the generals on the porch. The file holds the house's own testimony: the blood in the floorboards that no restoration removed, the cemetery the family dug themselves, and the five hours that turned a plantation into a permanent field hospital.

Carnton is the archive's field-hospital file — the McGavock plantation where the Battle of Franklin's wounded filled the children's bedroom, four generals lay on the porch, and 1,500 Confederates were reburied in the family cemetery.