Union Occupation
Cragfont was the home of Confederate Maj. George W. Winchester (1822-1878), his mother, Susan Winchester, his wife, Malvina H. Gaines, and their children. Their surviving letters and diaries describe life during Union occupation.
George Winchester remained at Cragfont after the war began. When his son, Pvt. Napoleon B. Winchester, 2nd Tennessee Infantry (CSA), was wounded at Shiloh in April 1862, Winchester visited him and decided to join the army. He served as Gen. Daniel S. Donelson's brigade quartermaster and later as fellow Sumner County resident Gen. William B. Bates's adjutant general.
Winchester's family and slaves operated the plantation. In 1863, the 1st Kentucky Cavalry (U.S.) under Col. Frank Wolford occupied the house and grounds. A family member recalled: "I felt I should choke with restrained indignation, when I saw those men the implacable enemy? stretched upon the sofa, and lolling in the chairs which only a night before had been occupied by friends from (Gen. John Hunt) Morgan's command." Soldiers stripped the grounds to your right of oak, ash, hickory, and beech trees to build quarters between the house and main road, and confiscated horses, cattle, and crops. The slave quarters emptied, and Malvina Winchester was arrested and escorted to Nashville to take the Union oath of allegiance.
In 1863, George Winchester was captured at Missionary Ridge and imprisoned, along with Napoleon Winchester, at Johnson's Island in Lake Erie until the war ended. Susan Winchester died in December 1864. After the war, pressing financial obligations forced George Winchester to sell his ancestral home and move to Memphis, where he practiced law until his death in 1878.
(Side Bar) Gen. James Winchester, a hero of the American Revolution from Maryland, constructed Cragfont between 1798 and 1802. The late-Georgian-style house was considered the finest mansion on the Tennessee frontier at that time.
Photo of James Winchester-Courtesy, Tennessee State Library and Archives.
(Inscription under the photos in the lower left) Col. Frank Wolford
-Courtesy Library of Congress.
Presbyterian chaplain William H. Honnell, who occupied the house
-Courtesy Eastham Tarrant, The Wild Riders of the First Kentucky Cavalry (1894)
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