TTHN Ep 8 - The Fort That Wasn't

Old Stone Fort has stood on this bluff above the Duck River for nearly two thousand years.

Massive walls of stone and earth stretch across a natural peninsula, enclosing nearly fifty acres. To early settlers, it looked unmistakable—a fortress. A place built for defense. A place of war.

But it wasn’t.

In this episode, we walk through the long story of Old Stone Fort—from early speculation and 19th-century investigation to the archaeological work that reshaped our understanding of the site. Along the way, we explore how this place was built, how it changed over time, and what it may have meant to the people who returned here generation after generation.

We also examine the layers that came later—the mills, the industry, and the transformation of the landscape—before returning to the central question that still lingers:

If it wasn’t a fort…what was it?

🎧 Bonus Content

A full-length interview with Keith Wimberley, manager of Old Stone Fort State Park, is available for premium supporters on Patreon.

📚 Sources

Faulkner, C. H. (1968). The Old Stone Fort: Exploring an Archaeological Mystery. University of Tennessee Press.

Davenport, S., & Gibson, J. (2023). The Duck River: A river like no other. The Tennessee Conservationist.

Mayo, B. (2019, November 6). Old Stone Fort: A solstice ceremonial site surrounded by river waterfalls. Murfreesboro Pulse. 

Tennessee Encyclopedia. (n.d.). Coffee County. 

Tennessee Encyclopedia. (n.d.). Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park. 

Tennessee Historical Commission. (n.d.). Historical Marker 2E 29: Manchester.

Tennessee History for Kids. (n.d.). Old Stone Fort. 

Wimberley, K. (2026, April 7). Personal interview.

L’Amour, L. (1985). Jubal Sackett. Bantam Books.

Interpretive materials and video presentation, Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park museum.

🎙️ Credits

Hosted by Big John Summers
Produced by Summers Media Enterprises

Music by Big John Summers

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Tennessee History Nerd. This is a podcast dedicated to Tennessee's past. Every week we bring you a new story about the people, places, and events that have shaped Tennessee and made it and us who and what we are. So grab your favorite beverage, find a comfortable place, and sit back and enjoy. The wind whispered through the tops of the hardwoods, gently, not rushed, but enough to break the early morning stillness on top of the bluff. The dew began to patter down, disturbed from its lodging place in the crowns of the trees. Dawn was past, but the sun still hadn't peaked above the horizon just yet. The rumble of the falls of the Duck River could be heard a few yards to the west. Somewhere nearby, a squirrel was cutting his way through the hull of a hickory nut, and his discarded debris lightly tapped leaves as it dropped to the ground below. As the sun rose and stronger light began to filter through the trees, they began to appear from the shadows. Earthworks, ramparts, extensive fortifications stretching down the edge of the plain atop the bluff running parallel to the river. These were no hastily constructed defensive positions dug in the heat of battle. Who built these? And just as importantly, why? The small party of settlers who first stood here had never seen anything like it. They'd crossed creeks and ridges, felled timber, raised cabins, but this was different. It wasn't the handiwork of any frontiersmen or militia. The embankments rose with deliberate geometry, graceful arcs that met at angles too precise to be random. They seemed to be ancient, older than any cabin or field cleared in living memory. To men and women who measured age in seasons and harvests, this place felt eternal. Someone murmured what seemed to be the obvious explanation. It's a fort. Another voice answered, half whispered, half awed. But whose? The soil beneath their feet held no answer. The ridges of earth were topped with grass and saplings, their roots gripping centuries of silence. The bluff overlooked the meeting of the duck and little duck rivers, a natural stronghold, surely, if a stronghold it was, to the settlers, steeped in a world of stockades and blockhouses, there was only one word for such a place, a fort. And so the name stuck, Old Stone Fort, though no one alive could tell them what enemy it was meant to hold back. Word of the strange earthworks spread through the small settlements of southern Middle Tennessee. Travelers passing through the area that would become Manchester, hunters following the river banks, and surveyors charting new tracts of land all found their way to the bluff to see the fort for themselves. Each new visitor arrived with a different theory, and most left with more questions than answers. In those early years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, frontier folklore filled in the gaps that science had yet to reach. Some believed that the Spanish had built it, remnants perhaps of DeSoto's expedition or an early colonial outpost whose records had been lost to time. There were theories that displaced Welsh Prince Motto and his settlers had something to do with it. Others thought that it must have been the work of the Cherokee, the dominant indigenous nation of that region at the time. And still others whispered about a lost race, an older civilization wiped from the earth before the Cherokee ever came. When asked about it, the Cherokees themselves gave a simple and haunting answer. It was here when we came. They told the settlers that the earthworks had been raised by people long before their ancestors, a vanished nation who worshipped, hunted, and lived among these same waters. The Cherokee held no claim to it, yet they seemed to recognize its power. In their stories it was a sacred place, a remnant of a people the earth itself had swallowed up. To settlers whose worldview was shaped by scripture and conquest, such a tale only deepened the mystery. The notion that a civilization could rise, flourish, and disappear, leaving behind monuments of earth defied the imagination, and so the fort became a blank canvas for every kind of speculation. All the while the bluff kept its secrets, the forest grew thicker, the walls softened under moss and fallen leaves, and time. For a century or more after the white man arrived, the question remained the same. Who built this and why? Even in American fiction, the mystery of these old embankments has left its mark. Novelist Louis Lemour, who rooted nearly all of his frontier tales in real places, opens his 1985 novel Jubile Sacket with a quiet nod to this same enigma. On the second page he writes Once it was not so, for there are earth mounds, and friendly Indians had told us of a stone fort built they know not when or by whom. Even Lemoore, writing through the eyes of a seventeenth century wanderer, recognized the fascination that still clings to this landscape, that sense that the earth itself is older than our memory of it. His stone fort was very likely a literary echo of this very bluff standing where the rivers meet, its builders lost to time. There is one moment in the historical record when the fort may have briefly lived up to its name. During the Nickajac expedition in 1794, it's reported that a detachment of militia camped within the enclosure, likely taking advantage of its elevated position and natural defenses along the rivers. If that account is accurate, it may represent one of the only times in its long history that the old stone fort was used in a defensive capacity. For a place so long assumed to be a fort, that's a striking irony. By the late nineteenth century, curiosity finally gave way to curiosity armed with shovels. The age of exploration had matured into the age of investigation, and Tennessee's quiet mysteries began to draw the attention of men who were determined to move beyond speculation and into something closer to understanding. Among the earliest of these was Joseph Jones, who in the 1870s not only visited the site himself, but took the additional step of having it surveyed. Unlike many of those who had written about the fort before him, Jones was working from firsthand observation, not simply repeating what others had said. His work helped establish a more reliable picture of the earthworks, one grounded in what could actually be seen, measured, and recorded. That distinction mattered. By the late nineteenth century, much of what had been written about the old stone fort was based not on direct examination, but on earlier descriptions, accounts copied, paraphrased, and passed along until they took on a life of their own. The result was a body of writing that often disagreed with itself on the most basic details, the height of the walls, their exact layout, even their purpose. The nineteenth century in many ways became a century of speculation about the fort. Theories multiplied, but answers didn't. It wasn't until 1928 that a careful scientific attempt was made to move beyond those earlier assumptions. That September, P. E. Cox, Tennessee's state archaeologist, spent two weeks excavating portions of the walls and the interior of the enclosure. For the first time, the question was approached not as a mystery to be explained, but as a site to be studied. And yet, even then, great questions remained. Its age, its purpose, and the identity of its builders were still not fully understood. The bluff kept its secrets. Later in the mid-1960s, Tennessee's own archaeologists returned to the bluff with new questions and, more importantly, new tools. In nineteen sixty six, the state engaged the University of Tennessee's Department of Anthropology to conduct a formal investigation of the site, corresponding with the opening of the new Old Stone Fort State Park. The work was carried out by a team that approached the Old Stone Fort not as curiosity, but as a problem to be studied. They cut a series of trenches through the walls carefully, deliberately, peeling back the layers of earth and stone that had been left undisturbed for centuries. What they found was not the result of a single moment of construction, but of a process. The walls revealed multiple stages of building with inner and outer stone facings and layers of earth filled between them, suggesting that the enclosure had been built up, modified, and perhaps renewed over time. Radiocarbon testing was attempted using charcoal samples taken from within the structure, though the results proved difficult to interpret. Many samples were rejected due to contamination or insufficient material, and even those that were usable could not definitively date the construction itself, only the materials that had been incorporated into it. Even so, the dates that could be established pointed generally to the early centuries of the Christian era, placing the construction within what archaeologists identify as the Middle Woodland period. What the excavations did not reveal was just as important as what they did. There was no clear evidence of sustained occupation within the enclosure, no accumulation of everyday debris that would suggest it had been lived in or used as a refuge in times of conflict. The absence of such material raised serious questions about the long held assumption that this was a defensive structure. Instead, the emerging interpretation pointed in a different direction, one that had been suggested before, but never fully supported by evidence. If this wasn't a fort, then its purpose lay elsewhere. Whether ceremonial, communal, or something not yet fully understood, the old stone fort appeared to be a part of a broader pattern of earthwork enclosures found across the eastern United States, structures whose meaning is still only partially known and understood. And even with the benefit of modern methods, investigators did not claim to have solved the mystery. They had refined it, narrowed it, given it clearer boundaries. But the essential question remained not just what this place was, but why it was built at all. What the 1966 excavation provided was not a final answer, but a clearer set of boundaries. It ruled out some of the oldest assumptions and narrowed the field of possibilities, but it didn't close the case. In the years since, archaeologists have returned to those same questions with new perspectives. Building on the physical evidence uncovered in the middle twentieth century, researchers like Stephen Yerka have looked not just at what was found in the ground, but at how the site fits within the broader landscape, its position between the two rivers, its orientation, and its relationship to other earthworks across the region. These newer interpretations don't replace the earlier work, they build on top of it. And in doing so, they begin to suggest that whatever the old stone fort was, it may have been designed with a purpose that reached beyond defense and perhaps even beyond what we can fully recover today. Even as archaeologists were working better to understand the old stone fort, parts of it were already gone. Long before preservation became a priority, the walls of the enclosure were seen not as something to be protected, but as something to be used. In the nineteenth century, a stage road was cut directly through the site, running between Manchester and Shelbyville. In doing so, it passed through the earthworks themselves, breaking what had once been a continuous enclosure. And that was only the beginning. Large portions of the walls, particularly along the western side near the Duck River and around the entrance, were mined for stone. That material was used in the construction of early bridges, one spanning the Duck River along what is now US 41, and another crossing the Little Duck River along what is now Fort Street. What had taken centuries to build was in places carried away piece by piece. By the time the archaeologists began to study the site in earnest, they weren't looking at it as it had been, but as what remained. The old stone fort had already been altered, not just by time, but by people who never intended to preserve it. And so the mystery we're trying to understand today isn't just incomplete, it's been partially erased. Today, Old Stone Fort stands as one of only two archaeological state parks in Tennessee, the other being Pennson Mounds near Jackson. Although more are planned, and a number of parks have archaeological features. But together, these two parks preserve the quiet pulse of that same woodland world, a world that measured power not by conquest, but by connection. Not by walls that excluded, but by earthworks that embraced. By the time those first archaeologists had brushed the soil from their boots, another set of builders had already left their mark on the bluff. The same rivers that had once framed ceremony now powered commerce. As early as 1823, Samuel Murray established a rope factory along the Little Duck River, drawn by the same steady current that had shaped this place for centuries. Though the factory burned in 1847, it marked the beginning of industrial use of the site. That transformation continued in 1852 when W.S. Whitman constructed a paper mill further downstream along the Duck River. A decade later, as the Civil War took hold, Whitman expanded his operations, building a powder mill adjacent to his paper mill in 1861 to supply the Confederacy. It operated only briefly. The following year, as Union forces pushed through the region during the Tullahoma campaign, the powder mill was destroyed. There's no evidence that fighting ever occurred within the walls of the old Stone Fort itself, but the surrounding region saw the movement of armies, and the rivers that had once drawn people together for reasons we still struggle to understand were now part of a very different kind of struggle. After the war, industry returned. In 1879, the Stone Fort Paper Company established a large mill along the Duck River near Big Falls, supplying paper to newspapers across the Southeast, including the Nashville Banner and the Atlanta Constitution. The bluff that had once marked a boundary between human and the divine had become a part of an industrial landscape, its rivers harnessed, its surroundings transformed. And yet, even as the machinery turned and the wagons moved, the earthworks remained. Workers passing through the area moved within sight of the walls that had stood for nearly 2,000 years, often without realizing the depth of history beneath their feet. Progress did not erase the past here. It simply built around it. By the turn of the 20th century, the fort was again a place of curiosity, this time not for its mystery, but for its endurance. It had survived worship, war, and work. And waiting at the edge of that industrial complex was another structure that would soon write its own quiet chapter in the story of the bluff. In time, the mills fell silent. Their wheels rusted in the grass, their timbers sank back into the earth, and the sound of the river reclaimed the air once filled with machinery. Yet one piece of that industrial age lingered. A bridge of steel and timber that seemed as though it had always belonged here. That old metal truss bridge wasn't born on this bluff. Its story began miles away in Franklin County in the early 20th century, where it once carried traffic across another Tennessee stream. By the mid-20th century, that bridge, a Pratt through truss structure, built with riveted lattice and graceful diagonal members, had been deemed too narrow for modern traffic. Rather than scrap it, the state sought a new home worthy of its character. In the early 1970s, as the old Stone Fort State Park was taking shape, engineers decided to relocate the bridge there. That move served two purposes. First, to preserve a piece of Tennessee's early industrial craftsmanship, and second, to provide a crossing between the two developing parks to halves, the day use area on one side and the campground on the other. For fifty years the bridge stood here, not as a relic, but as a living part of the landscape. Painted green, it blended with the canopy, its steel gleaming softly against the leaves, its wooden planks creaked with age, but never complained. It had a certain dignity about it, a gentle, almost courteous grace that made drivers ease their way across, not out of fear, but out of respect. It fit this place as though the river itself had carved a space for it. During those decades it carried everything that the park could offer wagons and Winnebagos, Fords and Chevies, bicycles and barefooted children. Families fished from its edges, couples posed for engagement photos against its trusses. It even carried wedding vows, my own voice once echoing there as I stood officiating a ceremony on its deck. The overcast light filtered through the lattice, and beneath us the same water that once turned mill wheels whispered its steady blessing. For a few still moments it felt as though time had folded in on itself. Ancient ceremony, industrial ambition, and And a simple human promise all converging in that one small span. Today the old truss bridge still stands, but not as it once did. It's been closed to traffic, its entrance is blocked off as work begins on its next chapter. The reason is simple. The bridge was built for a different time. Modern vehicles, especially large RVs, fifth wheels, and motorhomes, exceed what that narrow one lane structure was ever designed to handle. To maintain safe access between the park and the campground, a new bridge is being constructed in place of the old truss bridge, wider, stronger, and built for the demands of today. But I can't help but feel a regretful nostalgia at the old girl being moved aside for progress. And I feel quite certain that regardless of the well-engineered efficiency and capability of the new structure, it will most certainly lack the spirit and character of the old truss bridge. But unlike so many structures of its kind, this old bridge is not being lost. It's being moved. Recognized now as part of the history of this place, as much a part of the landscape as the remnants of the mills or even the ancient enclosure itself, the truss will be relocated within the park and repurposed as a scenic overlook along one of the hiking trails. Yes, it will be in a different place. Yes, it will have a different function, but at least it's being kept preserved. Unlike the old trust bridge across the Duck River on US 41 just outside the park's gates, this bridge isn't being destroyed. Like so many other repurposed things at Old Stone Fort, it's not being discarded. It's being given a new role. And so, even in transition, it will continue to do what it's always done, to connect people, not just across the river, but across time. And so the bluff still awakens each morning, much as it always has. Mist drifts up from the duck and little duck rivers, curling through the trees and settling softly against the ancient earthworks. The birds begin again each day at daylight, indifferent to the centuries. The air smells of water and earth and oaks and memory. And if you stand there long enough, you can almost hear every age at once, the songs of the woodland builders, the churn of the mill wheels, the echo of footsteps on a steel bridge that's soon to find a new home in the park. Old Stone Fort endures not because we've solved its mystery, but because we haven't, not completely anyway. It reminds us that some stories are worth keeping, and some mysteries may be better left unsolved. Not every question truly requires an answer, and not every monument has to serve a purpose beyond simply being. Some places hold memory like the waters of the river hold light, quietly, stubbornly, beautifully. The identities of those people who built the earthworks are vanished into the mists of time, and their ceremonies are only faint memories in the soil atop the bluff. The old mills on the banks of the river are but ghosts, and soon even the old bridge will be in a new place too. Yet the rivers still meet below that bluff, their waters still weaving together in the same way they always have. And if you pause long enough to listen, you can almost believe they're whispering the same question that's hung over this place for nearly two thousand years. Who built it? And why? Next time we'll leave the bluffs above the Duck and Little Duck Rivers behind, and we'll head over to the far northwest corner of the state of Tennessee to look into the land war that occurred around Real Foot Lake in the early 20th century. Join me next week for episode nine, Terror in the Night. Until then, I'm Big John Summers, the Tennessee History Nerd, and I am history. Before we close things out, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the sources behind this episode. This story draws from a combination of archaeological research, historical writing, and on-site interpretation. At the center of that research is Charles H. Faulkner's The Old Stone Fort: Exploring an Archaeological Mystery, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1968. That work documents the results of the 1966 University of Tennessee's excavation and remains one of the foundational studies of the site. I also made use of the interpretive materials provided at Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park, including the museum exhibits and the extended version of the on-site video presentation produced in cooperation with the park. Additional context comes from a number of published and digital sources, including the Tennessee Encyclopedia, particularly entries on Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park and on Coffee County. The Duck River, a river like no other, by Samantha Davenport and Jackson Gibson, published in the March-April 2023 issue of The Tennessee Conservationist. Bracken Mayo's article, Old Stone Fort, a solstice ceremonial site surrounded by river waterfalls, published in the Murfreesboro Pulse in November 2019. Tennessee History for Kids, which provides accessible interpretive material on the site. The Tennessee Historical Commission's marker 2E29 in Manchester on US 41, which provides historical context for the naming and early development of the town. And supporting background information from the Wikipedia entry on Old Stone Fort used as a general reference and cross-check against primary and secondary sources. This episode also includes insight from a personal on-site interview with Keith Wimberly, manager of the Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park, conducted on April 7th, 2026. Finally, while not a historical source in the academic sense, I'll note Louis Lemoore's Jubilee Sacket, which, like much of his work, reflects an informed, imaginative engagement with early American landscapes and frontier movement, and serves as a cultural touch point in thinking about how we interpret the past. As always, this episode reflects a combination of documented research, on site observation, and careful interpretation. Where conclusions extend beyond the direct evidence, they're grounded in the best available scholarship and clearly presented as such. Thanks for listening.