Could Have Changed Course of History : Civil War Fort Could Fall to Land Developers

Only the wind in the trees or the occasional chugging of an outboard motorboat on the river below breaks the silence at the old Civil War fort these days.

But, when Albert Winn Jackson sits dreaming on his cabin porch, he hears other sounds--the thunder of Confederate cannon or the frightening blast of old man Hinson’s big muzzle-loading rifle, a notch for each Yankee killed.

Jackson, 68, owns a small piece of Civil War history called Ft. Heiman, a 20-acre stretch of trenches and gun pits hacked out by pick and shovel from wooded limestone bluffs above the Tennessee River.

Unchanged in 120 Years

“It’s just like it was when the soldiers left it 120 years ago,” Jackson said as he stood on an outcropping 80 feet above the river.

But, with a bank calling in his mortgage, Jackson may have to sell the land. He fears the fort will fall to land developers, who think more about valuable riverfront lots than history.

“If this place isn’t preserved, nobody will know about it,” Jackson said. “It’s been a lot of work all these years holding on to it.”

Ft. Heiman, just over the state line in Calloway County, Ky., deserves a footnote in history as a place where something big almost happened.

Confederate soldiers were still rushing to complete Ft. Heiman in 1862 when Ft. Henry, a major Southern fortification just across the river, was destroyed by Northern gunboats under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

Opened Union Supply Routes

The capture of Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson, 12 miles to the east on the Cumberland River, opened vital Union supply routes into the Deep South and assured the fall of Nashville.

Historians say that Ft. Henry was built in the wrong place, on low land difficult to defend and easily flooded.

Ft. Heiman rests on considerably higher, harder ground and commands a much broader view of the river.

Had the South built Ft. Heiman first, the battle for control of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers might have turned out differently, Jackson contends.

“This is where the South lost the war, or could have won it. That’s the way it looks to me, and a lot of Civil War buffs have come to the same conclusion,” he said.

Historian Doubts Theory

But Charles Crawford, a history professor at Memphis State University, doesn’t share that view.

“They might have held out a little longer, but, frankly, I doubt that anyone would have been able to hold out against Grant’s amphibious forces,” Crawford said.

Grant’s attack on Ft. Henry involved at least seven heavily armed gunboats, a fleet of support vessels and more than 25,000 men.

Most of the 2,600 Confederate soldiers at Ft. Henry departed for Ft. Donelson in the face of Grant’s impending attack, leaving 50 artillerymen behind to cover their retreat.

Capt. Jesse Taylor, a Confederate officer who stayed for the fight, described the Union forces as overwhelming.

“Far as the eye could see,” Taylor wrote in an account of the battle, “the course of the river could be traced by the dense volumes of smoke issuing from the flotilla.”

And, when the gunboats opened fire, the fate of the meager Confederate defense was sealed.

“They showed one broad and leaping sheet of flame,” Taylor said.

Fort Held by Yankees

Union soldiers occupied Ft. Heiman for a year or so after the fall of Ft. Henry, and Crawford says many of Heiman’s earthen fortifications probably were built by Yankee soldiers.

While occupying Heiman, Union soldiers captured and executed two young brothers who claimed to be civilians out for an afternoon of hunting near the fort, Jackson said.

As the story goes, the young men’s father, Jack Hinson, swore vengeance on the Yankees and took to the woods with his 17-pound rifle.

He built a duck blind on the river from which he fired at passing supply boats and lurked around the edges of Ft. Heiman waiting for careless soldiers to venture his way.

“A relative still has the rifle, and it has 36 notches on the barrel,” said Elliott Moody, a real estate agent working to preserve the fort.

The Union had withdrawn from Ft. Heiman by 1864, and Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a flamboyant cavalry commander, moved in to begin one of his major campaigns.

Forrest, who had been ordered to disrupt Union shipping, mounted Confederate cannon at Ft. Heiman, sank a Yankee transport and captured two other vessels.

Cavalry Put on Boats

He put his cavalry on the two boats and sent them down river to support his attack on a major Union supply dock at Johnsonville, Tenn. But the makeshift Rebel navy had to abandon ship when attacked by Union soldiers more adept at fighting on water.

Forrest continued his ground attack on Johnsonville and destroyed the Union depot there.

Jackson bought Ft. Heiman from a college professor named Rainey Wells in 1953, paying $18,750 for 20 acres of wild river bluff.

“I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen,” he said.

Log Cabin on Site

Wells had built a log cabin on the site about 1925, and Jackson, whose main residence is in Paris, still spends most of his summers there.

In 1971, Jackson paid $56,000 for 170 acres bordering the original Ft. Heiman tract.

All of the land may be up for sale soon, because Jackson, a retired boilermaker, can no longer meet his mortgage payments of $26,000 a year to the Commercial Bank and Trust Co. of Paris.

Jackson said he took out a $167,000 mortgage on the land in 1982 to invest in the futures market, planning to use the proceeds to set up a foundation for preserving the fort.

The venture failed.