History Lost….And Found

History Lost….And Found

Discovery of municipal cemetery #2 challenges community to explore the unknown

Stringers Ridge Park is Chattanooga’s most used urban wilderness. Trails traverse steep terrain and offer city dwellers an opportunity to find quiet serenity steps from their homes. In 2022 the Trust for Public Land (TPL) completed the White Oak Connector, an immediately popular one-mile extension linking the trail system to Red Bank neighborhoods at the foot of the ridge and a large town park. Then folks started seeing a man with a metal detector…

Finding The Field

Retired police detective and historian Michael Hitt was trying to find the namesake of Chamblee, Georgia. Records led him to Chattanooga and a handwritten notation on a 1920 plat map mentioning a cemetery just below a now-demolished tuberculosis sanitorium. “Municipal Cemetery #2” had been lost to history. Hitt zeroed in on the location and explored with a metal detector, looking for long-forgotten grave markers. He discovered the “paupers’ field” mere yards off the White Oak Connector in a gully covered in kudzu resting under electrical utility lines. 

Now found and temporarily referred to as “The Field at Stringers,” The Field is the final resting place of more than 2,000 Chattanoogans, predominantly African American, buried between 1890 and 1912.  

Traumatic History

Daniela Peterson, TPL Tennessee Program Director, Welcoming Places, was moved by what she learned as she toured the site with Hitt. 

“The history of The Field is inhumane,” she says. “Conditions were so terrible that the Black community started a fund to not be buried there. Every caretaker was indicted for mismanagement. Corpses were stolen, graves are unmarked, but there are also still roses growing that were planted 100 years ago on a single, well-tended grave. I could not stop thinking about it.”

Maia Council, research fellow for the Middle Tennessee State University Center for Historic Preservation took Hitt’s research and expanded it, learning about the way Chattanooga evolved and the people buried in The Field. Perhaps the most striking story rediscovered thus far is the lynching of Alfred Blount. 

Blount, 51, was the first Black man to be lynched on the Walnut Street Bridge – more than a decade before the Ed Johnson lynching in 1906. Accused of rape despite significant evidence of his innocence, Blount was dragged from the Hamilton County jail by 1,000 white men, tortured, murdered, and left to hang from the bridge for hours. Blount’s wife refused to take possession of his body. In protest, she demanded the county inter Blount at The Field in protest – to communicate that the county was culpable of her husband’s murder and therefore would bury him.

This and other stories lead Peterson to contemplate the role of TPL in acknowledging and preserving the history of The Field.

Feeling a Way Forward

“We create parks,” she says. “Parks are places for people to make memories – and they can also be places to contain memories. A person can walk from where Alfred Blount was lynched to where he was burried. The Field is part of a constellation of stories. Our challenge as a community is to discern how to link the stories together and better understand our past and remember the people who came before us.”

TPL’s Black History and Culture Fund has made space for TPL to start a broad community dialog around The Field. So far, work has included community interviews, photo documentation of the site, and historical research. The majority of the property is now owned by the City of Red Bank, which was founded 37 years after the cemetery was closed.. After TPL’s initial report, in 2024 leaders agreed unanimously that the burial ground is culturally significant and that maintaining The Field is both sustainable and appropriate to honor those interred there. 

Commissioner Pete Phillips said at the time, “We need to shine the front porch light on this.”

The question persists, though, how best to shine that light. 

“We don’t yet know how this will look when it’s right, but we know what wrong feels like,” Peterson says. 

Landscape and Memory

She is inspired by the work of landscape designer Thomas Woltz, an expert in cultural analysis and use of the National Park System’s “Cultural Landscape Record” concept. The record considers the cultural, historic, and ecological past of a site, going back as far as possible and lays a foundation for master planning and what comes next. 

“With Woltz’s work, we now have a reference. It’s not like any other project, but we do have examples from around the country to look at,” Peterson says. “The unknown isn’t easy to navigate. Many people ask the question of themselves, ‘Am I the one? Should I even be doing this?’ But we are in a moment that isn’t optional. Exploring this history will be messy and we have to acknowledge ‘I didn’t do this, I wasn’t here – but I’m here now.’ There’s something here, we have to keep asking the questions to find the way through.”

In closing, reflect upon the concluding thoughts of Council’s report, The People of the Field: Rediscovering Black History at a Chattanooga Cemetery

“The people of the Field were an incredibly diverse group. They were migrants and immigrants who crossed states, the country, and even oceans to reach Chattanooga. They were laborers who worked in many different capacities throughout the city. Some were very poor; some died before they were even born. They are not buried under grand and expensive obelisks…; if they were left in peace, their final resting place may well be unmarked, overgrown, and nearly forgotten by much of the community. But the lives of these individuals were valuable and they were Chattanoogans who deserve to be remembered as part of the city’s history. The story of a city is not built only by the affluent figures for whom bridges, streets, or schools are named, but also by the working class who kept the city’s industries running. The Field and the people buried there are an essential part of Chattanooga’s Black history and deserve to be commemorated and celebrated as such.”