| RFW-292005-23 | Research Programs: Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research | Vanderbilt University | Descendant-led Excavation at the Reconstruction-Era Black Civil War Veteran Community at Bass Street, Fort Negley Park | 8/1/2023 - 7/31/2025 | $150,000.00 | Angela | | Sutton | | | | Vanderbilt University | Nashville | TN | 37203-2416 | USA | 2023 | Archaeology | Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research | Research Programs | 150000 | 0 | 150000 | 0 | Collection of oral histories and an archaeological excavation examining a neighborhood in Tennessee founded by Black Civil War veterans. (24 months)
Nashville’s Bass Street Community was a neighborhood formed by Black Civil War veterans and survivors at the foot of St. Cloud Hill on the UNESCO site of Fort Negley Park in the late 1860s. For three generations, descendants of this tight-knit community resisted white terror until the city’s urban renewal efforts displaced them. Previous oral history work with descendants of the space has revealed a population eager to talk about memories which shed light on the foundations and intact cultural deposits that prior test pits at the site have revealed. This project collects descendant testimony in oral histories which will guide an excavation of a Reconstruction-era home and two public spaces in the neighborhood. Together, descendants and scholars will revisit questions of US history throughout the Jim Crow era while they explore ways that residents utilized material culture to fortify their precarious status as free Black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. |