Sunset on the front porch. This is the plantation featured in the book, Widow of the South. I had assumed I would be taking more photos but the tour lasted until way after dark. We did however manage to see the many, many blood stains on the floor, still there 140 years later. There was also a couple of closet doors that opened mysteriously. It was kinda spooky. But a beautiful mansion. The family graveyard is in the background and a Confederate graveyard is just beyond that. Acording to our guide, after the Battle of Franklin, the Union Army (eventually) came to collect their dead. The Confederates were buried where they fell in shallow graves. After a couple of years as hands and such started to poke through, well, it became an issue. So Carrie McGavock, Mistress of the plantation, designated a plot of land for the Confederate cemetary. Workers were hired to find and exhume the nearly 2000 men and reinter them into a proper cemetary. Families still come today to find relatives.
The bloodstains on the floor, at this point illuminated by big spot lights since it was after dark while we were there, were mostly by the windows, which apparently was where they were doing most of the operating, or to be exact, the amputating. Limbs were piled up, legend says to the second story window. I think it wasn't quite thåt tall, but there were a lot of severed limbs. The closet doors that opened were creepy but the whole place had a very unsettling feeling about it. Much like an empty hospital, even though the house has been restored to the way it might have been the day of the battle BEFORE they turned it into a field hospital.
Fortunately, this house is still in the middle of wide open fields, so you really get a sense of what a plantation house was like. Very different than being 6 feet from my neighbors on each side as I am in LA.
