Former Site of Greer Stadium

To the right lies the southern slope of St. Cloud Hill. During and after the Civil War, this area was part of the defensive lines and daily activity of the Union military force. Up until the 1930s, houses lined the hill’s slope. They were evicted when the Works Progress Administration began to reconstruct Fort Negley and later where workers would build baseball diamonds and a public park in the 1940s. More recently, this was the site of Greer Stadium, home of the city’s minor league baseball team, the Nashville Sounds, between 1978 and 2014. Eleanor Fleming remembers that her father helped to construct the stadium in the 1970s, a century after her ancestors helped to come construct Fort Negley. He told her:

FLEMING CLIP 3: You know newsflash, “oh yeah by the way you know I worked when they were constructing Greer Stadium” because he's a construction worker, and I'm like “are you kidding me?” So I've got, you know, two great and three great-grandfathers who built Fort Negley, and my father was involved in some capacity building the stadium. And until October, I've never been here. Like I was thinking about like, did we take class trips when I was in elementary school or middle school, and I was like “We went to Fort Nashborough, but we didn't go to Fort Negley.”

Gary: I also have memories of Greer Stadium. During the Sounds’ last season in 2014, I sang the national anthem.

After the Nashville Sounds moved to a new stadium downtown, the future of the site was up in the air. In 2017, Mayor Megan Barry’s office accepted bids to redevelop the land. A development company was awarded the bid and planned to build a mixed-use complex on twenty-one acres of land to be leased from Metro Government. Push back from the community members, preservationists, and supporters of Fort Negley was robust. After an archaeological study determined that it was “highly likely” that human remains and historically significant artifacts were buried under Greer stadium and its parking lots—the developers withdrew their plans.

In March 2018, Mayor David Briley announced that the stadium site would not be redeveloped but rather restored as part of the Ft. Negley Park. Briley added: “[A] crucial piece of the park’s transformation will be to honor slaves who constructed the fort during the Union Army's occupation of Nashville.” But the neighborhood continues to grapple with gentrification and development. As one of the oldest Black communities in Nashville, the neighborhood, which is now known as Edgehill, still faces an uncertain future.

Follow the path around the bend. Stop at the next large informational panel on your right. As you continue walking, I will tell you a little about the people who built the fort.