One of the Union’s Biggest Earthen Forts Never Fired a Shot. On Sept. 19 It Hosts an Art Show.

Walk the greenway loop at Old Fort Park on any ordinary Tuesday and you will pass, without particularly noticing, a series of long grassy ridges under the trees. They look like landscaping. They are not landscaping. They are what is left of one of the largest earthen fortifications the Union Army built during the Civil War, and on Saturday, Sept. 19, roughly seventy artists will set up their tables on top of the story.

The festival, plainly

The 22nd annual Greenway Art Festival runs Saturday, Sept. 19, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., along the greenway trail inside Old Fort Park. Admission is free. It is hosted by the Cultural Arts division of the Murfreesboro Parks and Recreation Department, and the artists are juried — they apply and are selected, which is the difference between an art festival and a flea market and the reason this one is worth planning around rather than stumbling into.

Food vendors are on site, permitted through the city. Guest parking is spread across three lots: the Kid's Castle playground lot, the Old Fort tennis court lot, and the Old Fort ball field lot. Arriving early is the usual advice and the usual advice is correct.

Running alongside it is the 4th annual Junior Greenway Art Festival for artists under 18, which carries no registration fee. That is a small detail with a large effect: a teenager who sells their first piece at a booth thirty feet from working professionals tends to remember it.

What you are actually standing on

Here is the part almost nobody mentions.

In the first days of January 1863, the Battle of Stones River ended just outside town — one of the bloodiest engagements of the war measured against how many men were on the field. The Union held the ground, and then had to decide what to do with it. Murfreesboro sat where the road and rail lines to Chattanooga met, which made it the obvious place to stage everything needed for the next campaign.

So they built a fort around the whole idea. Construction started that same January, to a design by Brigadier General James St. Clair Morton, and by June 1863 it was finished. Fortress Rosecrans enclosed more than 200 acres behind nearly three miles of earthworks — nine perimeter lunettes bristling with cannon, curtain walls strung between them, and four interior redoubts held back as a last line. Inside sat storehouses, blockhouses and powder magazines. It was engineered to shelter 50,000 troops and to feed them for 90 days.

It was, by the end, one of the largest earthen forts the Union ever raised anywhere.

And nothing ever attacked it. That was the point — it was so obviously unassailable that no one tried. The largest thing Murfreesboro's war produced was a deterrent, and its entire military career consisted of sitting there being too much trouble.

Why that matters on a Saturday in September

Most Civil War ground in Tennessee is preserved by being fenced off and made quiet. Old Fort Park went the other way. The surviving earthworks — now protected as part of Stones River National Battlefield — sit inside a working city park with a golf course, ball fields, a playground and a paved trail full of joggers and strollers and people walking dogs badly. The fort is not behind glass. It is the terrain.

An art festival held on that trail is not an odd pairing. It is the most complete possible answer to what the fort was for. Fifty thousand men were provisioned here so that an army could move; a hundred and sixty-odd years later the same ground is a place people bring a folding chair and buy a coffee mug from someone who threw it themselves.

If you go

Bring cash and a bag, wear shoes you can walk a trail in, and give yourself more time than the four-hour window suggests — the greenway layout means the festival is linear rather than a single field, and the walk between the far ends is a real walk. Take ten extra minutes for the earthworks while you are there. They are marked, they are close, and you will not look at the park the same way afterward.

For everything else worth doing around the Square, the river and the greenway system, our local's guide to Murfreesboro is a good place to start, and the Parks and Recreation department keeps the rest of the fall calendar.