On November 25, 1863, more than 50,000 Union soldiers stormed the Confederate defenses along Missionary Ridge east of Chattanooga. The attack stretched from the Rossville Gap at the Georgia border all the way up to Tunnel Hill at the northern end of Missionary Ridge. By the end of the day the Confederate Army of Tennessee was retreating towards Dalton, Georgia, and Chattanooga was firmly in Union hands. It was, as one Confederate officer later described it, 'The death knell of the Confederacy.'— National Park Service.
Three decades later, in 1890, the Federal government 'reserved' the battle site of the Battle of Missionary Ridge as the nation's first national battlefield park (along with the Battle of Chickamauga, also in Tennessee). It named the Tunnel Hill site the Sherman Reservation Civil War National Military Park after William Tecumseh Sherman, the victorious Union general.
A century and a half later, at sunset, Confederate cannons, now quiescent and inert, still face west, down Tunnel Hill, aimed at downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.
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A beery aside
Beginning soon after the cessation of hostilities of the Civil War in 1865, and accelerating apace during the latter 19th-century, re-industrialization of the re-united nation would be fueled and refreshed (pun intended), in no small measure, by the development of large-scale breweries (particularly of lager beer). Many of these had begun as small-scale provisioners to the armies. Industrial innovation, including refrigeration, would both spur the growth of the breweries and result from it. But that's another story.-----more-----
