The Best Historic Places in Rutherford County, and What Each One Actually Tells You

Rutherford County wears its history unevenly. Some of it is marked, fenced and interpreted by the National Park Service. Some of it is a log cabin that was moved here from somewhere else so it would survive at all. And a great deal of it is not marked in any way, because the people whose history it was did not get monuments.

Here is our list of the places worth your afternoon — and, more usefully, what each one is actually telling you if you look past the plaque.

1. Stones River National Battlefield

Start here, because nothing else in the county competes with it for sheer weight. From December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863, Union and Confederate armies fought across these fields and cedar thickets and produced more than 23,000 casualties in three days. Per capita, it was among the bloodiest fighting of the entire war.

The park today runs to roughly 600 acres and contains two things you should not skip. The first is Stones River National Cemetery. The second is the Hazen Brigade Monument, which is believed to be the oldest intact Civil War monument still standing on its original site — raised by the surviving soldiers themselves, for their own dead, while the war was still going on. That is a fundamentally different object from a monument erected decades later by people making an argument. It is worth standing in front of for a minute.

Practical note: it functions as a park as much as a memorial. People birdwatch, fish, hike and bike here.

2. Oaklands Mansion

Oaklands was the largest plantation in Rutherford County at the time of the Civil War, and the house — architecture, period furnishings, gardens — is genuinely beautiful. It also briefly served as headquarters for Jefferson Davis during his time in Murfreesboro, which is the fact every tour mentions.

The fact that matters more is the first one. “Largest plantation” is a description of an agricultural operation, and that operation ran on enslaved labor. A house this fine existed because of it. Modern interpretation at sites like this has gotten considerably better at saying so, and the visit is richer when you hold both things at once: the craftsmanship in the millwork, and the arithmetic that paid for it.

3. Cannonsburgh Village

At 312 South Front Street, a few minutes' walk from the Square, Cannonsburgh is the county's most charming historic site and the one most people misunderstand. It is not a preserved village. It is a collected one — more than twenty restored structures gathered from around the region and assembled to represent roughly a century of early Tennessee life, from the 1830s to the 1930s.

You will find a working gristmill, a one-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, a doctor's office and a run of period homes. Purists occasionally sniff at the assembled-village format. Ignore them. Most of these buildings would simply be gone otherwise, and standing inside a doctor's office from the 1880s teaches more in ninety seconds than a chapter will.

It is also, for what it's worth, the easiest of these to do with children.

4. The Sam Davis Home, Smyrna

Just up the road in Smyrna sits the boyhood home of Sam Davis, captured as a Confederate courier and hanged at twenty-one. The house is preserved substantially as it was when he lived there as a boy.

The Davis story has been told in Tennessee for a century and a half with a particular romantic framing, and it is instructive to notice that framing while you are inside the house. What is undeniable underneath it is the plain fact of a twenty-one-year-old dying in a war, which is the least romantic thing there is.

5. The history that predates all of the above

Every site on this list is nineteenth-century, and that is a very short view of the ground you are standing on. This county was home to Cherokee, Chickasaw and Creek peoples long before any of these buildings existed. In the 1830s — the same decade Cannonsburgh's earliest structures represent — the Indian Removal Act forced thousands of Native people out of their ancestral lands across the Southeast.

There is no single site to visit for this. That absence is itself the point, and it is worth carrying with you through the other four.

How to do it in one day

Battlefield in the morning, when the light is low across the fields and the mist is still in the cedars. Cannonsburgh and lunch downtown in the middle of the day. Oaklands in the afternoon. Save Smyrna for a separate trip rather than rushing it.

Hours and admission vary by site and by season, and several run special events through the fall — call ahead rather than trusting a search result. Our roundup of what Murfreesboro Parks and Recreation is running covers the current calendar.

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