Weeding is just one responsibility of the park rangers who work at the Stones River Battlefield, where 81,000 men struggled in combat in Murfreesboro.
During a recent interview, Park Ranger James Lewis spoke with a casual New Jersey accent, his nose pink from being in the sunlight where he sifted through the undergrowth in Fortress Rosecrans. His meaty hands were rough from pulling the unwanted species, like Chinese Privet and Japanese Honeysuckle, to promote native plant growth in the battlefield.
The battlefield stretches over 450 acres and is lined with zigzag, wooden fencing that encloses a natural habitat filled with native plants, cotton fields and cedar groves beside Thompson Lane in Murfreesboro.
The hum of grasshoppers and locusts deafened the sounds of Murfreesboro as bikers cycled on the road that surrounds the park.
In the forest, fallen leaves crunched under hikers’ shoes and echoed off the trunks while limestone jutted from the earth like lone icebergs. The cedar trees branched out, blocking sunlight and preventing understory growth while allowing tourists to see what soldiers saw when fighting the Battle of Stones River in 1862.
When he thinks what a Confederate soldier would have seen during the time of the battle, Lewis gets chills but said that the park isn’t haunted.
“You can get chills in the middle of Fourth of July, if you just stop and think about what happened where you’re standing,” he said.
Lewis said tour stop No. 3 in the park is where he gets the most chills. Here, a huge field opens up. Cannons are strategically placed in the field to serve as an anchor that signifies the direction of the Union’s onslaught.
Lewis said that based on soldiers’ documented accounts the Confederate Army faced mass artillery and infantry, while birds flopped on the ground and trees exploded from the cannonball fire. He said the Confederates had little ammunition, no artillery support and were ordered to move forward as “hell came down upon them.”
“I don’t know if I’d have the guts to do it. They did about five or six times,” he said.
Lewis, who previously worked at the Edison National Historic Site in New Jersey, said he was always fascinated with the Civil War because “next to the Revolution . . . the Civil War is what ultimately forged us as a nation.”
Lewis said he moved to Murfreesboro in 1997, to be a park ranger, and later, he became the Stones River Battlefield museum curator, managing the living history program.
“Where else can you get paid to shoot a cannon?” he asked.
Lewis said he enjoys connecting people to the site by telling the history and the stories of the men and few women who fought the Battle of Stones River.
“We want people to feel some kind of personal or intellectual connection to what happens here,” he remarked.
The battlefield is important to Murfreesboro, Lewis said, because it brings the community together with other traveling Americans.
“Because both sides were Americans, there are literally family trees beyond counting that have great great grandfathers, uncles, [who] connect people personally to it before they even walk through the door,” he said, “Not most folks can wake up one morning and decide to go visit a place where 81,000 men struggled . . . to define us as a nation.”
For more information on the Stones River Battlefield, visit nps.gov/stri.
