Now, about my date...
Yesterday the Wifester picked me up from work and took me on an adventure. We became tourists for the day. We went to Carnton Plantation, in Franklin, TN. It served as the largest field hospital in this area for hundreds of wounded and dying Confederate soldiers. The floors of the mansion are still stained with bloody footprints. Ewwww. The grounds were once covered in blood, as this is the sight of one of the worst battles in the Civil War. It makes me sad each time I'm faced with the fact that I live in an area that is the epicenter of such racism and bigotry. But I believe that it is important to visit this part of our history, to understand and learn from it, so that we can move forward.
So much unnecessary death happened, all because of ignorance. The entire place feels as though the weight of the world presses upon it. At night, you can get a ghost tour. We went during the daylight hours, but that was eerie enough, to think of all the death and suffering that happened there, not only the soldiers on both sides, but the slaves who were being fought over as well. The slave's house was where I had the strongest reaction. It seemed so painful there. I felt as though more pain and more suffering than all the battles of all the wars had occurred right there in that front room. I immediately felt repelled from the room. The bedroom was peaceful and comfortable to look in, but the front room...it was dark and not in an absence of light kind of way.
Wifester kept the camera in her possession, so I was unable to take any photos, but she got many. You can check out the ones she's posted at her flickr page.
It was an eerie, heavy, and somewhat unsettling adventure, at a beautiful mansion on meticulously manicured grounds. I always enjoy being a tourist in my own hometown. Sometimes, though, it's tough.
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Amazing to think that many of the soldiers who died had spent hours suffering wounds with no medical treatment.....nowadays, of course, many injured soldiers survive but will be unable to live life as before.
Eisenhower said:
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality"
although certainly there are some things worth fighting for...
We have a lot of Revolutionary War stuff in this area. I rarely take advantage of it, but it is cool to be a tourist in your own backyard.
There are a few smaller Civil War battlefields around this area. They are pretty interesting places to visit.
That's where you guys go for FUN? ;)
Our town is one big morbid history lesson. The name of our river, translated, means blood. Nice, huh? No wonder we have so many nightly ghost tours.
gary,I'm with you, I don't know which is worse, no medical treatment, or living with those injuries and that trauma.
I'm of the opinion that I'm not so sure that war is ever the answer...
It's the hippie influence from my childhood, combined with my pacifist, socialist, nurturing nature.
Karen - playing tourist in my own back yard is one of my greatest joys. Ever since I emerged from my cloud of addiction in my youth, I enjoy relearning all that my public school system and my wild and untamed mind failed to adequately instill and respectively, learn.
jay - it still amazes me that such a huge war was fought for such reasons as it was, with such vehement passion. It amazes me to this day to see people carrying around that rebel flag, sporting it on the backs of their trucks, and tattooed on their bodies. I look at these places, and all the graves, and think, so many people dies to free so many people, yet all of this antagonism indicates that we still have a long, long way to go.
Tink- yeah, sad, huh? LOL we like the haunted tours, and we like to go where we can get photos of nice architecture, and by we, I say Wifester can get photos.