FIRST - Day of Battle - Stones River - Murfreesboro, TN - First of its Kind on Waymarking.com

County of marker: Rutherford County
Location of marker: Old Nashville Hwy, ¼ SE of Stone River National Cemetery, Murfreesboro
Marker erected by: National Park Service

Marker text:
  ...thousands of small arms kept up a roar equal to Niagara.
   Men were swept away by hundreds -- trees shrubs and everything was torn up, cut off, and shivered...
   John Magee, corporal, Stanford's Mississippi Light Artillery

Anchoring the Union Line
HAZEN'S BRIGADE

Veterans called this blood-stained open ground ahead of you "Hell's Half-Acre." Here a brigade of 1,600 bluecoat infantry faced wave after wave of attackers attempting to overrun them. Four times Confederate brigades charged. Four times the defenders here gave no ground.

At dawn, 43,000 Union soldiers had stretched from McFadden's Ford, one mile to the north, to the Smith farm three miles to the south. By noon, half of that huge army had folded back on itself, like a pocketknife closing, with 13,000 men dead, wounded, or captured.

Four regiments that fought so fiercely here under Colonel William Hazen were the hinge of that folding knife. From 9 a.m. to dusk, Hazen's men were the only Federals to hold their ground on the first day of battle at Stones River.

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