Franklin - Winstead Hill

Winstead Hill is a small park south of Franklin. Hood kept his headquarters here during the battle as it offered a nice view of the valley. It still offers a nice view although there are a ton of buildings in the way now. But you can still see where many of the important parts of the battlefield are from here.

When I first went to Winstead Hill all that was near the parking lot to indicate this was a Civil War park was the cannon and the state historical marker. Since then a monument to Freeman's Battery of Forrest's Cavalry (for an April 10, 1863 engagement) has been placed here.

There is also a marker in the parking lot to explain the history of this piece of ground.

Up the hill is a nice metal relief map that shows important places and gives some background of the battle.

And here is the view from the map. The Columbia Pike can be seen running across the center of the picture towards the left, disappearing at the top of a ridge (which is right where the Cotton Gin and the Carter House are).

A view from the bottom of the hill so you can see that the Columbia Pike is right next to the hill.

And some closeups of the Freeman's Battery monument. Monuments of this design are up at various other parks. I've seen them at Brice's Crossroads and Parker's Crossroads. There might be others I'm forgetting about but those two instantly pop into mind.

Near the relief map are a bunch of other monuments for the generals killed at Franklin, there were six in all.

John Adams

John C. Carter

Otho F. Strahl

States Rights Gist

Hiram Granbury

and Patrick Cleburne

There is also a monument to Cockrell's Missouri Brigade.

This is a very nice park. Its nice that it has a good number of markers and monuments that help explain the battle. Its also nice because it offers good views of the battlefield. One can only imagine how good these views might have been if the battlefield had been preserved in the 1890s but that is long since past. I imagine the visitor's center would have been at Winstead Hill.