It was at about this time 154 years ago that one-third of the Army of Tennessee passed silently through these woods, on their way to Franklin and then Nashville.
If I have estimated correctly, the original route of Hood Road was here. Nathan Bedford Forrest, himself, lead an advance guard of cavalry through here consisting of men from Biffle’s regiment of Tennessee Cavalry. We know this because Biffle’s regiment engaged the enemy on November 22 on the Turnpike, and this was the route they most likely took to get there.
Among those men was likely a large contingent of men from Lawrence County leading the way through familiar territory, and among those local men very likely could have been my own 3x-great-grandfather, Milas Alley, who grew up just a few miles north of this place, near Henryville, and who fought in Biffle’s regiment from 1862 until its surrender in 1865.
If Milas was at this place, he could have never guessed that one day, in a much more peaceful time, his grandson Charlie Alley would buy this land, and that it would pass down to his descendants to this day, when his 4x-great-granddaughters would play and laugh in the leaves there while cattle grazed languidly nearby.
That day in 1864, my ancestor was a 23-year-old soldier fighting for a nation that had not long existed and that had but six months left to exist at all. He was riding through the frigid drifts of a freak November blizzard, no doubt wondering if that day would be the last of his short life, or if he would ever come this near his home again.
He did survive that day, and he went on to survive the war and six more decades beyond that. In fact, that day in 1864, he had not yet seen a third of the days he would see before death.
We have no clue what he thought when he passed through these woods, and we don’t know if he would have appreciated the serendipity that generations of his descendants yet unborn would come to live on and love this land that he passed through so briefly with his comrades that cold day.
I like to think that he would have grinned if he had known it—cold and hungry and scared though he may have been; and that he would grin still today if he could see my girls playing in the leaves there.
