John Shearer: Several Reminders Of Confederacy Found In Chattanooga

Around the South, the debate about the symbols of the old Confederacy and their current place in American society following the recent tragic shootings in Charleston, S.C., has begun taking place.
 
In Chattanooga, the National Park System has announced that Confederate battle flags will not be sold in the local park gift shops.
 
The city also has other, more permanent reminders of the old Confederacy, including a bust of Confederate Gen. A.P. Stewart on the Hamilton County Courthouse lawn and two Confederate cemeteries.
 
The reminders exist primarily because of the fact that Civil War battles took place here, battles that are also remembered by the countless markers and monuments erected by participating states from both sides on battlefield parkland.
 
As a city on the Northern edge of the Deep South, Chattanooga had voted to secede from the Union at the start of the Civil War and join the Confederacy, while Hamilton County as a whole had voted to join the Union. As a result, the community was torn in spirit and allegiances.
 
As the war progressed, the Chattanooga area became torn apart physically, too, as battles such as Chickamauga, Orchard Knob, Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge decimated the area and created havoc for those who remained. So, too, did the sieges that preceded the skirmishes.
 
And as the 19th century gave way to the 20th century, a different kind of war ensued. This one was over civil rights and involved marching, protests, speeches and, unfortunately, some violence.  As a reaction to that or simply an offshoot by some whites, words that used Rebel or some other reference to the older South became popular in Chattanooga and elsewhere.
 
Whether right or wrong, they simply became a part of the city’s vocabulary during that time and are now a part of its history.
 
For example, a Chattanooga city directory from 1965 – exactly 50 years ago – shows a Confederate Gift Shop at 2540 Cummings Highway and several businesses that used the name Rebel. Examples of the latter included the multiple Rebel Drive-In restaurants around town at such places as Rossville Boulevard and Fort Oglethorpe – and later on Hixson Pike. Also listed were a Rebel Construction Co. on Calhoun Avenue, Rebel Distributing Co. on Cowart Street and Rebel Motors.
 
Probably the most memorable use of the name Rebel in the 1960s dealt with the Brainerd High sports teams. An all-white school when it opened in 1960, it eventually began admitting black students in the late 1960s as desegregation continued.
 
Several black students did not like the use of “Dixie” as a fight song and let it be known, and some tense times took place among the school community for several days in the fall of 1969 as various viewpoints were heard. Many people from that time cannot forget seeing cars sporting Confederate flags lined up near the school during nightly rallies.
 
A few years later, as Brainerd became a predominantly black school, the nickname was changed to Panthers after the teams were briefly the Rebel Panthers.
 
On a lighter note, many Chattanooga Baby Boomers recall that television personality Bob Brandy’s Palomino horse on the popular “Bob Brandy Show” on Channel 9 was named Rebel.
 
One business during this time also used Southern-related wording for its business, but the purpose of the attraction was simply to teach some history. To help boost tourism and create more interest in the Civil War as the centennial approached, Chattanooga News-Free Press editor Lee Anderson and business partner Pendell Meyers opened the Confederama museum. Located initially at 2550 Cummings Highway when it opened in 1957, the museum featured a model of the Chattanooga landscape and used miniature soldiers, lights and audio from Luther Masingill to tell the story of the local battles during the war.
 
When it first opened, Confederama – which featured Confederate battle flags on the front -- advertised itself as the “world’s largest battlefield display of its kind.” One can quickly figure out that the business would likely not have drawn as many customers if it had been named “Unionerama.”
 
In 1962, Confederama moved to another fortress-style building at 3742 Tennessee Ave. in St. Elmo, where it operated for more than three decades. Rock City purchased the museum in 1992, and renamed it the Battles for Chattanooga Museum in 1994.
 
In 1997 the museum display moved up on Lookout Mountain to a building outside the entrance to Point Park, where it remains today.
 
Trying to teach Civil War history – and make a little money in the process – goes back many years. Way back in the 1880s, a popular large-scale cyclorama painting of the Battle of Missionary Ridge that had been produced by the same company that did the current Cyclorama in Atlanta’s Grant Park was on display in Chattanooga for a period.
 
The old Confederate engine, the General, was also on display at the now-razed Union Station in downtown Chattanooga across from the Read House for years and was a tangible reminder of the Andrews Raiders chase. In that 1862 event, several Union spies led by James Andrews hijacked the train and tried to destroy transportation and communication lines of the Confederacy in North Georgia.
 
The train is now in a Kennesaw, Ga., museum, although a replica of it stands on a marker in Chattanooga’s National Cemetery, where some of the Raiders – who were the first recipients of the Medal of Honor – are now buried.
 
While the names dealing with Rebels or the Confederacy have disappeared, more tangible connections to the war remain. As mentioned, the Chattanooga area has two Confederate Civil War cemeteries.
 
One is the Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery that is part of the cemetery by Third Street near UTC. It houses the remains of a few Confederate soldiers who died in the area hospitals. They were originally buried in the area where the Manker Patten Tennis Center and the Scrappy Moore UTC practice football fields are.
 
Because of flooding problems initially, the graves were re-interred at a more elevated spot up the hill after some land was purchased from the Gardenhire family. Additional land was later deeded for a miniscule amount.
 
The stone and wrought-iron gate featuring the Confederate battle flag was designed by Lawrence T. Dickinson and was erected in 1901 and dedicated the next year. The bandstand on the grounds was erected in 1920 by the A.P. Stewart chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, one of two UDC chapters still in existence in the Scenic City in 2015.
 
For years the UDC used a home at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Fourth Street and called it Confederate Memorial Hall. A Victorian structure that featured a conical roof in one section, it was torn down in recent decades during an intersection widening.
 
The Silverdale Confederate Cemetery out near Lee Highway and Bonny Oaks Drive was on land once owned by William Standifer. As an ailing man late in life, he told the Nathan Bedford Forrest Confederate Veterans Camp in Chattanooga about 1900 that some Confederate soldiers who had been members of Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army had been buried there after dying in local hospitals.
 
The cemetery was later purchased from Mr. Standifer’s widow, and in 1934 a rock archway was built at the cemetery by the local highway commission.
 
Even beyond World War II, Chattanooga hosted a number of Confederate Civil War reunion gatherings. It had also hosted Union reunions. By the later years, most of the Civil War veterans were as old as the World War II ones are now.
 
On the Hamilton County Courthouse lawn, a bust-style statue was put up after World War I in honor of Confederate Civil War Gen. Alexander P. Stewart. A West Point graduate from Rogersville, Tenn., he fought in the battles around Chattanooga during the war.
 
He later became chancellor of the University of Mississippi, and when the national parkland around the Scenic City was being developed, a Confederate veteran was required to serve on the commission acquiring land and developing the park. He received that honor and became familiar again with Chattanooga – and Chattanooga with him -- while he lived here for a period in the 1890s.
 
Around 1919, about 11 years after his death, the A.P. Stewart chapter of the UDC dedicated the statue.
 
It has silently stood sentry over the courthouse lawn for nearly 100 years, but now such Confederate icons everywhere are under greater scrutiny as America continues to try figure out how to move from its complex past into a more perfect future.
  
Jcshearer2@comcast.net