Walk the Old Road
“For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.”–Marcus Tullius Cicero
Even a casual survey of the American Civil War rarely omits the introduction of the Spencer repeating rifle to the Union army. It was among the first repeating rifles adopted by the U.S. military with a capacity for seven premanufactured rimfire cartridges, all of which could be discharged in mere seconds. By comparison, the firing speed of older percussion cap rifles was three or four rounds per minute for an experienced soldier. To say the Spencer rifle made a tremendous difference in the war is an understatement.
A few months ago I found myself standing on the very battlefield where the famed repeating rifle met its first major combat test. While there, thanks to a dedicated historical arms enthusiast, I held in my hands a Spencer rifle documentably used in that battle (a history nerd’s dream). As I took the repeater into my hands, the weight surprised me. Unloaded, it weighed around ten pounds. It felt solid, but bulky.
But what really caught my attention that day was the weight of the past. The battlefield area now overlooks a large interchange of Interstate 24. Though the battle of Hoover’s Gap set the stage for later ones at Chattanooga and Chickamauga, were it not for the Confederate cemetery atop the hill, passersby would hardly be aware that such a significant event had occurred there. Over time, the old Manchester Pike gave way to a more modern highway, eventually becoming US-41. All my life, 41 was called “the old road,” but the real "old road" is still visible if you know where to look. Now, I-24 has largely superseded them all.
The power of place is unique; it lifts the words off the pages of a history book and puts the reader into the world of those who wrote the contents with their lives. A place can plunge you into the minds that navigated the moments. It taps into human connection, offering those hair-raising moments when a person can realize, “I am looking through their eyes.”
For a split second that day at the Beechgrove Confederate Cemetery as a light rain fell around the pavilion, sounds of the interstate disappeared, the sight of the interchange faded into the dense countryside landscape of Tennessee in 1863, and I could hear the crack of that rifle.
I believe Michel de Certeau rightly said, "History begins at ground level, with footsteps."
**The American Battlefield Trust has a current campaign to save 438 acres of battlefields, one of which is part of Hoover’s Gap! You can learn more about that effort here.
***More on the Battle of Hoover’s Gap.
****I want to thank Jim Ogden and the Tennessee Civil War Preservation Association for making the battlefield tour opportunity possible!
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