Your Brother's Blood

The discovery of a forgotten burial place outside Chattanooga sheds light on a century of racial discrimination and raises questions about the path forward.

Words by Tom Lee | Photos by Megan Ledbetter

Peterson is walking me out of downtown Chattanooga, across the Walnut Street Bridge, through North Chattanooga’s gentrifying neighborhoods, and over the short, steep hills of Stringer’s Ridge, where TPL built and maintains trails clogged on weekends with what Peterson calls the “granola/spandex crowd.” 

This brilliant winter morning, as we ease down the White Oak Connector Trail, we pass through a chapel of oak saplings, trunks leaning over the trail from each side, branches intermingling in the light breeze, dappling sunlight across the soft footway. “I work for the Trust for Public Land because I believe in public space and the importance of public space. That’s one thing. And I know the power of the work that we do, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?” Peterson says. “But also, in this particular case, I live two blocks from the Connector, so I truly experience the power, which it’s been really eye opening. I talk more with my neighbors, I see them more often. We have something to talk about, like this sense of community, belonging.”

In 2022, during the completion of this trail, a readily identifiable core function of TPL, an organization that claims as its mission every American should live within a 10-minute walk of a park, Peterson got a phone call.

“Like, this is a bad joke,” Peterson recalls. “This is a very bad joke.”

The caller had news. A retired police officer from Georgia, sleuthing a story about his own hometown’s origins, had discovered a secret Chattanooga had been keeping for more than a century. 

“And in my heart I was like, ‘Please don’t tell me that we built a trail over a cemetery.’” But they had. And not just any cemetery — a scandal-laced potter’s field where, from 1882 to 1912, the community had dumped the bodies of its poor Black citizens, including hundreds of children, out of sight and, for more than a century, largely out of mind. I too had heard rumors of this godforsaken place and TPL’s wish to redeem it, which is what brought me to Chattanooga. I had spent months immersed in 19th century news archives and public records, trying to figure out who lay here and what message they might have for their abusers, for their descendants, for the community.

Peterson, who immigrated to the United States 10 years ago with little English and fewer prospects, is the one who finally asks the right question. A close friend recently had visited from Chile and died suddenly in Chattanooga. It had fallen to Peterson to ship his body home.

“That was like a very privileged deal — all the details and all the cultural differences we needed to consider,” she says. “But he was a citizen of the country, you know. I have a lot of friends that, they are not. And I actually haven’t answered that question, what happens with people here that are undocumented, noncitizens, and don’t have the money to be sent back?”

And that’s when it hits me. I am no longer walking through history. In December 2024, I am in the damn moment, a month before the world changes, before a long-forgotten burial ground begins to speak to those in Chattanooga today who are not refugees from slavery in Georgia, but from autocracy in Venezuela, gang violence in Guatemala, drug cartels in Mexico. What would this place mean for them, their families, their loved ones, if they were to die on an unsafe construction site, if their children were stillborn, if their elders simply expired for lack of health insurance?

Where would their bodies go? Would anyone tell the authorities? Would it be any different?

What Peterson, the Trust for Public Land, and the people of Chattanooga would do next, might just tell us.

The American Civil War destroyed most Southern communities in its path. Atlanta, Columbia, and Richmond burned to the ground. Fredericksburg is still pockmarked from its shelling, Petersburg and Vicksburg from their sieges. Jim Crow preserved white Southerners their privilege, but doomed small-town economies to stagnation.

The Civil War, however, made Chattanooga.

In 1860, just prior to the war, the Census counted 13,250 people in Hamilton County, Tennessee. Thirty years later, the city had quadrupled to some 53,000. The spark came from a tenfold explosion in the city’s Black population from 1,611 in 1860 to 17,717 by 1890. The legacy of this migration lives today. The city is 29 percent Black, by the latest Census estimate, and has the third-largest Black population of any Tennessee city.

What brought them to Chattanooga? The United States Army.

In mid-November 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant made his winter headquarters in La Grange, Tennessee, 250 miles west of Chattanooga. Abandoned by plantation owners who fled in advance of Grant’s army, the local population of enslaved people, without protection or prospects, began migrating to the only functioning government around — Grant’s army.

Grant entrusted a Presbyterian chaplain, Col. John Eaton, with a unique command: “the oversight, more or less direct, of the interest of 770,000 slaves set free by the war.” In his posthumously published memoir, Eaton wrote that Grant hoped an “army of blacks might be transformed … into a positive assistance to the Union forces,” whether building roads, cooking meals, nursing in Army hospitals, or, one day, fighting in the infantry. And, in many ways, they did.

The army thus became a unit not just of military might, but of social justice. “Anywhere occupied by the Union, those seeking freedom worked to make these places their own, to make them begin to conform to their visions of freedom,” wrote Amy Murrell Taylor in her 2018 book, Embattled Freedom. The north shore of the Tennessee River in Chattanooga became just such a place. When Grant reached Chattanooga, refugee slaves came to the Army, especially from Alabama and Georgia, where no such refuge yet existed. As Grant’s troops camped north of the Tennessee River, Black people did, as well. “A prominent Quaker abolitionist farmer named Joshua Beck owned most of the property on the north side of the Tennessee River,” wrote author Courtney Elizabeth Knapp in her 2018 book, Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie, a study of Chattanooga’s post-war development. Beck, she noted, “allowed these refugees to set up a camp on his farm. By November 26, 1864, more than 3,893 refugees lived in the camp. Hundreds more poured in each day.”

They named it “Hill City.”

Looking East from Cemetery Road to the Field, September 2023

These refugees, and the heavy industries they fueled, powered the Dynamo. Knapp’s research found a guidebook published to pitch the city to Northern investors that said, “Chattanooga is one of the least Southern of the South’s great cities.” Indeed, Black residents of Hill City had newfound economic agency. “For decades, the city had had a reputation as a liberal bastion where African Americans could access certain economic and social opportunities not afforded elsewhere in the Deep South,” Knapp wrote. John Wilder, one of the Union heroes of the Battle of Chickamauga and, later, the 24th mayor of Chattanooga, called his adopted home, “the freest town on the map.”

But reputation did not always match reality.

Eaton noted unique racial tension in Chattanooga. He wrote that the Scots-Irish of East Tennessee had been victims themselves of indentured servitude and were “too poor to profit” by slaveholding. Thus, they resented the Army’s resettlement of Black people in their midst. Eaton observed: “The prejudice of the whites against the Negro was even more acute” in Chattanooga than in Memphis or Vicksburg, Deep South communities where the numbers of freedmen were far greater.

John Trowbridge, a Boston journalist who toured the South — including East Tennessee — in the war’s immediate aftermath, concurred. “There is at this day more prejudice against color among the middle and poor classes, the ‘Union’ men of the south, who owned few or no slaves, than among the planters who owned them by the scores and hundreds,” he wrote.

This postwar resentment, which simmered during the Army’s occupation, boiled over in the violent “redemption” of the South in the mid 1870s, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the refusal of the federal courts to hear civil rights cases under the reconstruction statutes, all taking the South, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, “back toward slavery.”

“Probably in no country in the civilized world did human life become so cheap,” wrote Du Bois in his treatise “Black Reconstruction in America.”

The early 1890s were peak years for racial violence in the South. 1892-93 saw more lynching of Black citizens — 279, according to a compilation by the law school of University of Missouri at Kansas City — than any other two-year period in American history. That’s when Alfred Blount moved to Chattanooga, and not long after Hamilton County bought a potter’s field.

He was a day laborer, and few people ever labored through a day as Alfred Blount on February 14, 1893.

At sunrise, he chopped wood and gathered laundry for his Chattanooga neighbors. In the afternoon, he was picked up on suspicion of sexual assault. By nightfall, as “Carmen” played in the booming city’s opera house, Blount’s bullet-riddled body swung from the trusses of the Walnut Street Bridge.

The next morning, after they carried his body across the bridge, over the Tennessee River, and the government rolled his corpse into an unmarked trench beyond Stringer’s Ridge, he became a sensation across the entire front page of the Chattanooga Daily Times: 

LYNCHED

Alfred Blount, a Negro, Suffers Death
•
He Ravished a Woman and Swift and Sure Was the Vengeance of the People
•
Taken From the County Jail to the County Bridge, Strung Up Under an Iron Girder and His Body Riddled with Bullets

In the account underneath the headlines, the Daily Times reported that a small, stocky Black man visited the Helen Street home of one Mrs. M.A. Moore, “a widow, aged 51” at 9 a.m. on February 14. The newspaper reported that the man asked Moore for some food and that while she was gathering it, “a big black hand was firmly placed over her mouth and the grip changed … to her throat.” Though the newspaper used only the Victorian euphemisms of the time, the intended message was clear: Mrs. Moore had been raped.

Police were called, searches made, and a parade of potential suspects brought to her home in a police paddy wagon. Finally, police found Blount and presented him for inspection.

“‘That’s the man!’ Mrs. Moore said at first,” according to the Daily Times. Then, “No, I am not so certain.” Egged on by neighbors who said Blount had been at their houses asking for work, police arrested Blount, though he protested his innocence: “I swear before God ma’am, I ain’t been near your house.”

Blount was shackled and taken to the county jail. And that’s when crowds began to gather with “threats of lynching … heard continually.” Inside, police were doubtful they’d arrested the right man. The Daily Times reported that police prepared a record stating “the identification of the Negro was not satisfactory, and asking the public to postpone any violent act until more was learned.” After an hour-long interview, their reporter was unable to “secure a confession.” For her part, the newspaper said, Mrs. Moore continued to be unsure of herself and spent the afternoon in bed.

None of this slowed the lynch mob, which the Daily Times counted at 1,000 by 8 p.m. Then a man claiming to be Mrs. Moore’s son shouted, “I know that the man in jail is the scoundrel we are after.” That seemed to be enough. The mob sledgehammered the jailhouse doors. Then, as the Daily Times put it, “At last the inner door gave way, and the mob surged inside. The air was rent with shouts, yells, curses, and maledictions.”

Bone Near the Detention Pond, April 2024

It was a cool night, the first in five days without rain. So, there was no impediment of weather to diminish the mob as it pressed Blount forward onto the Walnut Street Bridge. At 10:48 p.m., a rope was thrown over the bridge’s girders closest to downtown. Men put the noose around Blount’s neck. Another group pulled the rope across the truss. “The negro was lifted off his feet and swung clear of the floor. A shout arose, but it was quickly stifled. Within ten minutes the body hung limp and lifeless.”

The crowd fired on Blount’s corpse until it was “riddled by hundreds of bullets,” according to the Nashville Banner. When the Daily Times went to press at 1 a.m., the newspaper reported Blount’s body still there.

He had hung there, bullet-riddled and broken, for three and one-half hours.

The light of day found Blount’s body across the Walnut Street Bridge under the roof of an open-air stable in Hill City. Despite the return of the rain, the Daily Times reported “hundreds” passed to view him until it was time: 

About 3 o’clock the county sexton called for the body and it was buried in potter’s field at the expense of the county. Among the unmarked graves of unfortunates the fresh mound was built, and while the heavens poured their flood upon the grave diggers, the body of the Negro was lowered, marking Finis over an event which will long be remembered in local history.

Truthfully, the newspaper’s readers did not remember that long.

In August 1893, a grand jury indicted five men for murder and 21 others as accomplices in the lynching of Blount. “These names are all familiar ones in Chattanooga, the great majority of the ones being among the best-known of the city residents,” the Daily Times reported, noting, “A number of these men are men of family, bearing the most excellent reputations as law-abiding, useful citizens.”

So, nothing more happened. The state quietly dropped the charges and hoped the city would forget.

But is forgetting the right verb? For such an intentional act, forgetting seems … passive.

Blount’s widow, Annie, who had married Blount only two months earlier, did take action — boldly suing the sheriff for failing to protect her husband. Black newspapers across the country took up her cause. “A hard fight will be made to bring the guilty parties to justice,” declared the Cleveland Gazette. The New York Age collected a defense fund. The next year, pioneering investigative journalist Ida B. Wells included Blount’s case in Red Record, her catalogue of U.S. lynchings. But there was never any retribution. Eight months after the hanging, a judge dismissed Mrs. Blount’s case.

In 1906, 19-year-old Ed Johnson, another Black man accused of rape, was also lynched and hung from the Walnut Street Bridge — despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s having issued a stay of execution. That case received recent notoriety in a 2001 book, Contempt of Court, by Mark Curriden, helping ignite a decades-long effort to memorialize Johnson. In 2021, statues of him and his lawyers — one of whom had represented Annie Blount 13 years prior — were erected next to the bridge. Nearby plaques mention Blount and the city’s two other known lynching victims. Though some Chattanoogans have refused to walk across, the all-pedestrian span is now a popular tourist attraction.

But not so for the potter’s field. It has now been 125 years since executed prisoners like Blount, along with tuberculosis patients, stillborn infants, gunshot victims, and injured workers — all of them poor, nearly all of them Black — were committed to unmarked burials in a glorified ditch in Chattanooga. 

In the early years, there were occasional grand jury investigations and lawsuits, newspaper accounts, and neighborhood gossip. The public knew the graves were unmarked, barely covered by dirt. They knew body parts were often visible. They knew the county had fenced it off, not to honor the dead, but to keep the pigs out. It was all there for anyone to see. They knew.

Hundreds of elected and unelected officials have served the county since then. Someone should’ve spoken out, whether in shame or in honor. But they chose not to. For more than a century, they all chose not to.

A century passed in silence.

But the Field also knew. And, in our time, the ground itself would begin to tell it all.

If one was looking to hide something, or someone, this would be the place.

It is early November on the Stringer’s Ridge Connector Trail, a quiet walkway just north of downtown Chattanooga maintained by the Trust for Public Land. Michael Hitt, a retired Georgia police officer and amateur historian, leads our walk. He recently “discovered” the Field and has become its most enthusiastic guide and interpreter. Despite the humid, 80-degree afternoon, Hitt wears an Indiana Jones-style fedora and leather bomber jacket. A cross-body pouch carries necessities for the adventure. We peer into a wall of undergrowth until Hitt recognizes vegetation that is brown and lifeless, a sign the brush has been cut recently.

This is the passageway.

One step into the brush and the climate changes from yellow-gray and hazy to green and cool. Hitt clears stray branches with a pair of pruning shears. Within seconds, we are upon the old Cemetery Avenue roadbed and locate a rusted, diamond-shaped medallion bearing the number “342.”

It is an unreconciled grave marker from the first decade of the 20th century, the final years of the Field’s service as a burial ground. To the extent medallion 342 ever served its purpose, whether decoration or data point, only its shaft, hammered into the earth, actually marked the ground bearing a grave. As with so much here, the medallion is broken. All it signifies now is that, in this mortally wounded landscape, we are among the spirits. 

Hitt walks us a few steps forward and the canopy draws back, revealing a high, steep ravine, tree trunks and hillsides alike draped in invasive Japanese kudzu. The shape suggests the ruins of a Roman amphitheater; we are on the stage. Turning back to see from where we have come, leafy, 100-foot tulip poplars rise above the brush in a backdrop of ancient growth.

This is Hitt’s ninth visit to the Field since 2021. I ask him to describe how he feels.

“Like I’m amongst friends,” he says, “and they know I’m trying to help them be recognized.”

There are four of us standing here. We’re friendly enough, but Hitt doesn’t mean us. He means the souls underfoot.

Hitt isn’t without some basis for this claim. In April 2021, he invited paranormal investigators Ed Laughlin and Brian Daffern from Ghosts of Georgia in Atlanta to bring electronic equipment to the Field. They measured shifts in temperature and sudden changes in animal behavior (frogs in a pond suddenly silent, for example). They brought a multiple-frequency device called “a spirit box” to record what paranormal investigators call electronic voice phenomenon.

“We’re all skeptics on the team, we don’t believe everything’s paranormal,” Laughlin told me. “You kind of have to prove it to us also. But if our evidence leans towards the paranormal, we’re open minded enough to say, ‘OK, well you do have something here.’”

I, too, am a skeptic. I am also curious. So, I asked for Laughlin’s EVP tapes. And he sent them, about 20 in all. It’s a lot of static, to be honest. But I listened when an investigator asked clearly, “Tell us your names so we can identify you,” and two distinct sounds emerged:

“Arkansas,” I hear, pronounced Ar-kań-zass.

“Cole,” I hear immediately thereafter.

Aha, my inner skeptic thought, that’s not how you say Ar-kan-saw. But my curiosity sent me to the history of the pronunciation of the state name. And I found, according to the Arkansas Secretary of State, such debate in the 19th century that not even the state’s U.S. senators could agree on how to pronounce Arkansas. The legislature eventually settled the debate, passing what is now Arkansas Code 1-4-105, finding “confusion of practice” and mandating the official pronunciation as Ar-kan-saw in 1881.

I did another cross-check. In 1909, according to county death records, authorities buried two men, dead from gunshot wounds. One of them was a 27-year-old Black male.

His name? Will Cole.

Michael Hitt in the Field, February 2024

• • •

The Field wasn’t the first burial location for poor Black persons in Chattanooga. For a while, the county had a contract with Forest Hills Cemetery, a “sanctuary of magnificent botanical beauty,” as its website still says, opened in 1880 at the foot of Lookout Mountain. In the post-Civil War era, pauper burials at Forest Hills cost taxpayers $7.50 per burial, “more than the authorities felt justified in paying,” according to the May 8, 1882, Daily Times. 

The cost of burying poor people too high, the county chose a different path.

It bought the Field.

“The land is located … on the western slope of Stringer’s Ridge,” the newspaper wrote when the county bought the property. “It commences near the highest point of the ridge. The land is divided by two gorges and lies mainly on the slope of the ridge, affording natural drainage and a splendid outlet for all the surface water; it is also amply supplied with springs.” The newspaper says the county also contemplated future construction of a “poorhouse and an insane asylum” on the property.

Political advantages of the plan were numerous. There would be no more fees paid to private cemeteries. The burial ground could be reached by wagon from Hill City. Most importantly: It was out of sight.

And all of those factors made it popular with the county’s doctors and ambulance drivers. In 1889, the county death registries say a person a day was buried there. “Ninety-five percent of the interments are Negroes,” reported the Daily Times in January 1890. An earlier assessment in the newspaper put it more starkly: “A considerable percentage of the pauper deaths was among the colored people.”

None of the pauper deaths were honored with headstones or markers. Reports surfaced in the local press of grave robbing to supply nearby medical schools with cadavers, bodies buried without caskets, and frequent burials under less than a foot of dirt. The Daily Times characterized the cemetery this way in 1894:

The potter’s field!

The mere words fall on the ear with a grating, jarring effect and cause a shudder.

Even the poorest, the most abandoned, the most degraded dread the possibility of being laid away in this crowning shame.

“It is, indeed, a gruesome sight to pass through this charnel-house of the dead and observe the condition of the hundreds of graves there,” wrote a reporter for the Daily Times on June 3, 1904. “The county’s dead are deposited into a hole in the ground scarcely large enough to receive the coffin and only a few inches of earth thrown upon the coffins.

“In a few months, when the coffin begins to decay, thus allowing the few inches of dirt to sink down, it is then an easy matter for an individual to place an ordinary stick into the opening and even into the coffin, thus exposing the gruesome remains of somebody’s friend and somebody’s near and dear relative. There are not a few graves in this condition.”

Another Daily Times reporter visited in September 1906 and found conditions no better, writing, “If there is a blot on the civilization of Hamilton County that make-believe cemetery is it.”

Today, those horrors lie beneath mountains of wild vegetation. One can still make out the roadway that marked some old plat maps. At the bottom of the ravine, we find more of the numbered grave markers, some broken, some propped against stumps. To the extent that sextons of the Field kept records, they are, by every account, long gone. The steepness of the slopes, and the ditches carved by the streams coursing over them, suggest remains carried over the decades into Stringer’s Branch, which drains the valley below, and into the nearby Tennessee River.

The scale of the loss is overwhelming. Perhaps this place, whatever it was, is gone.

Except, a few weeks later, I’m cursing a stem of thorns that nearly slices me open near the center of the Field. My companion marvels, “That’s not a weed, that’s a rose bush.” When I get home, I happen across a Daily Times article from April 15, 1913: “There is only one grave in the entire cemetery that shows the care of tender hands,” the newspaper reported. “While this grave has no tombstone, there has been erected a rude enclosure which protects it from the hogs and cattle. In the center of this grave, there is a rose bush growing.”

Lo, as the old hymn says, a rose e’er blooming. 

Other secrets of the Field endure in plain sight. They are there, all of them, in the painstakingly careful work of government clerks inscribing line after line, page after page, of the Hamilton County Death Registry. Once the property of county government, then the Hamilton County Public Library, these massive volumes record, in cursive loops and swirls, the names, ages, “colors,” causes of death, and places of burial of everyone — white or Black — who died in the county. The registries used to exist in mammoth volumes of bound paper. Now, they can be accessed through online ancestry research companies such as ancestry.com or 23andme.com. You need a paid subscription with the online firms to access them.

Sometimes, however, clerks made no entry in the “place of burial” column. Choosing to count conservatively, my database excluded them. I counted only persons whose death records showed “county cemetery,” “Stringer’s Ridge,” “over the ridge,” or some particular description in the “place of burial” column. Once downloaded and sorted into spreadsheets, they offer fresh insight into the questions and answers of the Field. 

To start, I counted 2,198 persons buried here.

The Hamilton County Death Registry listed the names of every person who died in the county, though records are often incomplete, particularly for children.

Who were they? A 17-year-old killed by “railroad injuries” in 1898, a reminder of the dangers of modern machinery that couldn’t stop on command. A 50-year-old man “overcome by gas while working in cave” in 1899, a reminder that occupational safety and health was, and is, important.

I was prepared, of course, to find familiar causes of death associated with aging — consumption, tuberculosis, dropsy, starvation, heart disease, old age — and they are present in great numbers. But the more I worked in the records, the more I realized a horror for which I was unprepared. A 2-year-old “thrown from bridge and killed” in 1910. In 1898 on Cowart Street, where restaurants now offer patrons $150 dinners, an “unknown child … found in well.”

Children. I began counting the children.

There were hundreds of stillbirths, “premature births,” and infants with no cause of death or age listed. Many are recorded only this way:

Douglas, infant of Rosa.
Morry, Infant of Billie.
Baxter, Infant of Anna.
Two infants.
Infant.
Unknown infant.

It goes on for pages, a conspiracy of anonymity. My spreadsheet logged 1,226 children and minors under the age of 18 buried in the county ravine, 85.2 percent of them Black. While Hamilton County operated the Stringer’s Ridge burial ground, dead children accounted for more than half — 56 percent, to be precise — of the entire burial census.

Joseph Williams, an historian at Lehigh University, curates the Eulogy Project, an online memorial to children who lost their lives in the 21st century to gun violence and other factors such as police violence and transphobia. The Project is part visual tribute, part oral history. I asked him how our culture’s recent experience with child death might inform our thinking about the not-so-distant past.

“The reason why these kids are neglected or forgotten or totally disappear from public discourse is in part because of a working assumption that they offered no legitimate value to society,” Williams said.

In a rare recognition of the human stories behind the burials, after the visit of a Hamilton County grand jury to the burial ground in September 1906, the newspapers took notice. From the grand jury report:

“We found the bodies of babies covered only by the leaves showered on them by the trees, as if they would give them the burial denied them by the rich, populous and prosperous county of Hamilton.

“The head of a baby was entirely exposed. The little crop of hair still clung to the scalp, wet with the recent rains and liable to be devoured by vultures or hogs at any moment.”

But for this grand jury, the grisly sight was somehow not the worst of it.

“We cannot find words strong enough to express our feelings at finding the utter neglect of all pretenses at system, order or even decency in burying the dead. There is no pretense of separating the whites from the blacks.”

It is as close as the public record ever comes to admitting what Eaton and Trowbridge had observed some 40 years earlier. In a place where children were dumped among falling leaves, the highest affront to the white community’s conscience was the failure to segregate the dead. 

Looking back through the available record, one can only guess today why Hamilton County chose July 1912 to close its 30-year business on Stringer’s Ridge. A report to the county court on July 1 made the familiar accusation of a burial of a person “less than eight inches beneath the ground.” It wasn’t a new accusation and it wasn’t the worst. It was just the last. The Daily Times said the county court decided “the best thing to do was to abandon it, build a hog-proof fence around it and forget it.”

That’s what they did. The burials stopped. The Daily Times moved on. The cemetery records apparently disappeared. The government walked away. Pauper burials returned to Forest Hills.

And then: nothing. For all the intentional disrespect present in the Field at first, and there was plenty, it dulled over the decades, fading into a benign neglect until, at last, all who could remember what they had done, and to whom, could remember no more. 

For it had never happened, never happened at all. 

In mid-autumn 2024, an exhibit of photographs by Chattanooga State Community College art professor Megan Ledbetter opened at Stove Works Gallery — a sprawling brick industrial building erected in 1915 that had once housed a stove manufacturer and a casket company. On a warm Friday night, patrons balanced white wine and finger food as they moved about each other and the curated work. As Ledbetter engaged the attendees, she showed them a notebook of research into her subject.

It was the Field.

In 2022, Ledbetter, who holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, had become aware of chatter that the Chattanooga team of the Trust for Public Land had taken an interest in the Field. She was intrigued by what she heard about the site and approached Noel Durant, who leads TPL’s work in Tennessee, volunteering to take some pictures.

This evening, 24 framed photographs, taken over two years, hung in a carefully designed, white-walled corner of the Stove Works space. Black-and-white landscapes, they were both wide-angled and close-up. Rime ice sparkled on ferns. Heffalumps of kudzu settled in a summer evening’s light.

No people appeared in the images. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

“It’s this one if you want to see it,” she told me.

Ledbetter hands over a photograph she took on the 130th anniversary of Alfred Blount’s interment. The subject could not be more mundane, a retention pond at the bottom of the ravine, likely built by the 1990s developers of a gated community atop the ridge. But Ledbetter’s image nevertheless shimmered, power and surrender, shadow and spirit, moving across the water. It not only placed the viewer in February 15, 1893, it placed Blount there, too.

“It was very cold and very atmospheric,” Ledbetter said. “And that was the only picture I made that day. I didn’t need to make any more.”

The opening marked a culmination of Ledbetter’s project, as well as a celebration of her documentary vision. But the exhibit also marked the public opening of a campaign to change the future of the Field.

The Trust for Public Land is one of the nation’s leading conservation organizations. It has a specific vision — “land for people” — that historically translated to the development of park spaces. Of course, the Field is in no way a park, nor is it likely to be. So, what’s an organization known for developing parks doing here?

Jocelyn Imani, a Nashville native and Fisk alumna with a Ph.D. from Howard University, now serves as TPL’s national director of Black history and culture, a recent emphasis of the organization. Imani, who began her career as a National Park Service ranger, says implied within the TPL’s 10-minute walk standard is a core belief in communities’ and individuals’ right to self-determination. In other words, what do they want to walk to?  Imani says TPL is ready to expand its vision.

“How do we connect those who have been left behind to the outdoors?” Imani asks. “Those not even left behind. Those who have been excluded and pushed out? [We’re embracing] the goal of self-determination and the goal of leveraging the power of public land for the benefit of Black communities. That’s how it fits into the big picture.”

When I ask her if Tennessee is ready for a community-wide conversation about the Field, she readily confesses: “Nope. But the moment is now.”

For TPL, the moment began in early 2021 in the final stages of opening the White Oak Connector Trail, a mile-long path that links a maze of trails TPL maintains on the main body of Stringer’s Ridge to a public park belonging to the city of Red Bank.

“That’s when we started to hear there was this historian who had been looking for the potter’s field,” said TPL’s Durant. “And he thought it might be next to our trail.”

The “historian” turned out to be Hitt, the retired Chamblee, Georgia, officer who spent 34 years on the beat — and is unafraid to expend shoe leather in search of a mystery.

“When you get your hands on and there’s something to it, then I start digging, ’cause I’m gonna find the truth,” Hitt told me. “It’s out there. You just have to find that needle in the haystack, OK? But once you find it, you can start following its trail for more information.”

Hitt was not looking for the Field. He was writing a story for a hometown Chamber of Commerce brochure about Wiley Chamblee, the namesake for his hometown in Georgia. Hitt traced him to Chattanooga. He found the Hamilton County death record that said Chamblee was buried in the County Cemetery. He jumped in his car for the hour’s drive to Chattanooga.

“I just wanna get a picture of his grave or you know, the site of where he is buried and I’m done, right?”

Hitt drove to the Hamilton County Library and asked the reference librarian for the location of the county cemetery in 1910, when Chamblee died. The librarian told him that if Hitt could figure that out “‘you’ll be solving a major hole in Chattanooga’s history.’ I’m going, ‘Oh great.’” So, unable to resist the mystery, Hitt went to historical societies, the state archives, the Bessie Smith Cultural Center in Chattanooga, local experts in Black cemeteries.

“No one knew. Nobody.”

Hitt searched for months. He read accounts of burials and funeral services. He searched maps. He researched the history of Hill City and the contraband camps. He learned the details of the Alfred Blount lynching. He found the newspaper accounts of the condition of the Field. Ultimately, he narrowed it down to a location north of the Tennessee River and the other side of Stringer’s Ridge.

And that’s when the local planning commission sent him an old plat map from the 1920s with two little words he hadn’t seen anywhere else: “Potter’s Field.”

He recruited local metal detector enthusiasts to go with him to the site. Ping, they found a diamond-shaped grave marker with a number on it. Ping, ping, they found more. They located the old Cemetery Roadbed. They also found evidence of unhoused persons living on the site. Their discovery of a human femur clinched it.

Hitt has become the site’s evangelist. He attended Ledbetter’s exhibit opening, where his stories seemed to draw as much attention as the photographs. None of this troubled Ledbetter, for no one has spent as much time in the Field the last two years.

“You know, there’s this hidden world under there,” Ledbetter told me. “It feels visceral and tactile. I am in the realm of the spiritual, the metaphysical, allowing that to finally develop after being out there for months and months and months, twice a week. So I go as often as I can go.”

TPL is now in the early stages of seeking funding for a project at the Field that is as yet so undefined it defies description. The Trust has raised enough money to bring renowned landscape architect Thomas Woltz to Chattanooga in the hopes Woltz might work some visionary magic on potential donors, who might then make a site plan and design possible.

Woltz, who counts the restoration of Monticello’s slave graveyard among his credentials, came to town in late November for a public roundtable discussion with TPL leadership, local activist Donivan Brown, and Carmen Davis, senior director in  the Chattanooga mayor’s office. Imani moderated. Hollie Berry, now vice mayor of Red Bank, was in the audience, too, along with one of her fellow commissioners and planning staffers. 

Red Bank, population 12,065, was incorporated out of a slice of Hamilton County north of Stringer’s Ridge in 1955, which is when and how the Field came into the town’s boundaries. Once Red Bank and TPL realized their connector trail brought joggers and hikers into close proximity to 2,000-plus burial sites, they agreed to work together on conservation strategies.

“It’s important to honor the history of this site,” Berry told me. “To try to do justice to the people that were buried there. And that’s a tall order, especially for a small little city like ours. And so that’s why I’m so grateful to our partners, like Trust for Public Land, that are coming in to help us navigate this very deep and tricky important opportunity that we have.”

The meeting, billed as a brainstorming session, illustrated just how tricky the work ahead will be.

“The people in the Field are the refuse of Chattanooga and Hamilton County,” Brown exhorted. “These are our dumping grounds. The work of the Field is the work of repair.” 

Davis predicted “there will be many challenging conversations” about the site’s future.

It fell to Woltz to remind those attending of the real work ahead, tending a place “that was never intended to be tended.” As he told the group: “It’s a very, very sick landscape. I hope whatever emerges is not a thing, but an experience” that builds community around a shared understanding of history and the impact of local politics.

Reflecting after the event, Imani acknowledged the challenge ahead of re-imagining the Field. “We are going to make missteps,” she said. “We’re gonna make decisions that somebody from the outside may say, ‘You could have done this better.’ And we can’t get defensive about it. We have to just listen.”

Later that day, Woltz and I walked the Field. Woltz called it a “gorge.” He talks about soil histories, runoff management (“it’s really hard to zip a stream back up”), kudzu eradication — structural challenges any one of which is so great it would buckle the knees of mere engineers. So, when we made our way to the center of the Field, the ravine’s walls rising above us and poplar leaves fluttering to the earth beneath us, I didn’t ask Woltz what he’s planning.

I asked him what he was feeling.

“I don’t have any particular religious affiliation,” he began, “but as a scholar, I’m very aware of the Old Testament. And as we feel the leaves falling down, I’m feeling something in equal measure coming up. And I remember, you know, there’s that famous scene when God reaches out to Cain and he says, ‘Where’s your brother?’ And we have the famous line of, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ that we all know. But it’s the next line in Genesis that’s so interesting, because the reply from God is ‘Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil.’

“And I feel like that line is what I’m feeling right now, is that there’s this sense of rising up as the leaves are falling down and we stand in that liminal space between these two worlds.

“And this becomes a stage for social justice and truth-telling. And I think putting the truth on this stage is what’s gonna be the important challenge of this project and its potential opportunity for justice.

“And everyone is watching.”

It is 6:50 a.m. when my phone rings. The voice on the other end says her name is Shawnie Ayer. 

“I’m just getting off work. I’m a night shift nurse.”

Ayer is steering her Toyota Camry through the pre-dawn chill on the high plains of the eastern New Mexico desert. She’s returning a message I left her via ancestry.com. I think I have found the final resting spot of her great-great-great-great grandmother. Adaline Smith, age 80, birthplace unknown, dead of “old age,” was buried in the Field on September 7, 1904.

I thought Ayer might like to know.

She does.

“And the death records indicate that she was Black,” I tell her.

“I gotcha,” she says. “So that’s kind of what I was thinking.”

For the next 50 minutes, Ayer and I, strangers to one another, come to terms over Adaline Smith and her story, Ayer and her story, and the six generations between them.

Ayer told me that the family held that Adaline was “a Cherokee squaw.” So, Ayer took a genetic test. “My [test] would have indicated if there was any Indigenous DNA in me, and there’s not,” she told me. Ayer’s DNA test did, however, indicate she is a small fraction Congolese.

Ayer asked cousins, “how is this possible?” And that, she says, is when one of her cousins told her about the rape.

“He said, you know [Adaline] was raped by a slave owner and that, as a result … there was a child involved … which was very common in the South back in those times.

“And apparently [that trauma is] just something that’s kind of went through generations in my family and the women in my family, because, you know, there’s been a lot of detachment and a lot of abandonment and a lot of all kinds of strange things with the females in our family.”

Ayer isn’t alone.

Detention Pond, May 2024

My research found six persons alive — there surely are many more — who are direct descendants of persons buried in the Field. I reached out to them all. Two — Ayer and Latoya Battle of Columbus, Ohio — called me back, their family stories heartbreakingly similar.

Ayer told me of family tragedies affecting principally the women in her history. Divorce. Suicide. Substance abuse. Prison.

Battle, whose great-great-great grandfather, Melvin Britton, was buried in the Field in 1890 (cause of death, pneumonia) detailed alcohol abuse, drug addiction, a grandmother murdered, and a great uncle “dumped in the Ohio River” over drugs.

“It’s like a generational curse,” said Battle, a 43-year-old single mother of five. “I want to know my people, I want to know my history, I want to know why this is.”

Ayer’s story echoed the same themes, even using some of the same words: “I mean, those family skeletons, they are still there. My mom is still in denial and just not wanting to know the truth. But my mother went to prison when I was 10. So, I mean, it’s just been like, you know, one generation after another. [I was] the first one to start breaking that, you know, generational curse.”

Generational curse. They both said it.

In conversations about reparations, the emphasis is often on financial equity. But how do you get your story back? Your heritage? As Battle said, your people? 

And, perhaps, your future?

I ask Battle how she’s doing.

There is a pause, enough time to sense something genuine. “No one ever asks me how I’m doing these days,” she says. “Life is not easy.”

Ayer feels it, too. She shares a cousin’s text, meant to hold her up.

“Yes, there was slavery and rape involved and as a result, you have plenty of biracial and multiracial relatives,” reads the text. “It’s an ugly and evil reality but we can’t change it. Without those people, neither one of us would exist. Crazy isn’t it? I’m just thankful for my family, you included.”

Before Ayer and I end our call, she makes a request.

“It would be very interesting to know what was happening that made these women make the choices that they made.”

I imagine Shawnie Ayer traveling to Chattanooga, getting close enough to hear Adaline Smith’s blood call out to her from the soil, so Ayer can decide if these are the answers she needs and the truths she deserves.

We hang up. In New Mexico, the sun is almost rising.

On January 27, 2025, a group calling itself the Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan claimed responsibility for leafleting a diverse Chattanooga neighborhood barely a mile from where Megan Ledbetter had exhibited her photos. The leaflets were clear:

Leave Now
Self-Deport
Avoid Detention

I began calling and texting sources. I wrote my editor. Nothing can light me up like the realization that the damned Ku Klux Klan was onto something I had missed the entire time.

For sure, the Field is a looking glass through which we can come to understand old fears and prejudices. That’s how I entered this story, seeking to understand the past. One can point to explanations small and bureaucratic — incompetence rather than malevolence — but in the main, a Black burial ground gone missing for a century in the Deep South seems not to be the stuff of happenstance. But the Field is also a third eye, a line of sight to the future. 

And this is what the Klan’s leaflets tell us. For while one side exhorts self-deportation, the flip side promotes a February 15 “Tri-State Klonklave,” promising “good food, fellowship, speeches, and Knightrides.”

“In the South itself, the conversation is so white and Black,” Daniela Paz Peterson had said to me on the trail. “And then you have this other community that is growing very fast. And we have no name. Now, where our bodies are going to go is a problem. And when we are part of the conversation, that’s a struggle.”

The Klan, however, senses no such struggle. All are aligned at the Klonklave, where the refugees of 1865 and the refugees of 2025 will be equally on the menu.  ◊

Tom Lee is the member-in-charge of the Nashville office of Frost Brown Todd, one of the nation's 150 largest law firms. He is a political strategist and lobbyist in his home state of Tennessee, a certified lay servant in the United Methodist Church, and a frequent contributor to the Bitter Southerner.

Megan Ledbetter is an artist and educator based in Red Bank, Tennessee, whose lens-based work explores personal, cultural, and historical narratives tied to place. Her current photographic project, The Field, is part of a larger collaborative initiative to recognize and repair a derelict municipal cemetery for the poor and dispossessed in operation from 1890-1912, discovered recently in her hometown.  Through generous support from the Current Art Fund (2023-2024), her work combines visual imagery, historical research, and community engagement to shine a light on the complex overlapping histories at this abandoned burial ground.

Additional research by Jacob Creekmore