Management Summary
Nash Farm Battlefield Historical Archaeology Project

 By Daniel T. Elliott, The LAMAR Institute, Inc., Savannah, Georgia, February 18, 2007.

The Battle of Lovejoy Station, September 2-5, 1864, was mostly an infantry and artillery battle with Major General Sherman’s combined Union forces to the north pitted against Major General William Bell Hood’s combined Confederate forces to the south.  The ranks on both sides of this engagement numbered in the tens of thousands. The study area was located at the eastern flank of the battle. After several days of skirmishes and engagement at Lovejoy, General Sherman opted to retreat with his army to Atlanta for a period of rest and recuperation. The weary Confederate troops also took this opportunity for relaxation and many camps were established across the landscape, including several campsites in the study area.

Historical research about the battles in the study area is ongoing by the LAMAR Institute. This research will include a thorough review of the documents already gathered by Mark Pollard, Henry County Historian and long-time Civil War buff. Ms. Tracy M. Dean is actively conducting the historical research, assisted by Mr. Elliott and Mr. Dan Battle. The historical resources pertaining to the study are extensive and diverse and they include official military reports, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal diaries, personal correspondence, maps, early U.S.D.A. aerial photographs, later reminiscences by veterans who were present, secondary personal accounts by military officers who were not actually present, and later secondary histories, particularly David Evans’ Sherman’s Horsemen. The historians will attempt to sort out the various accounts of the events and reconstruct the sequence of events that transpired. The historical data will be integrated with the archaeological findings to hone the story of what actually happened on the property in 1864.

The Field Survey

The LAMAR Institute’s investigation at Nash Farm was the second research study conducted on the property. The 2007 archaeological study of the Nash Farm Battlefield Park yielded very different results from that obtained in 2006 by the firm of TRC Garrow & Associates (D’Angelo, Holland and Thomas 2006).  The TRC team located very few artifacts associated with the Civil War events on the property (fewer than 3 items of definitive military origin) and they concluded that the Civil War archaeological resources on the property were not worthy of further investigation and that the battlefield could best be interpreted by studying relics gathered by local collectors. The findings of the LAMAR Institute team stand in sharp contrast to results and recommendations of the TRC study. We conclude that the TRC research approach was badly flawed and inappropriate for the battlefield situation and that the LAMAR Institute research strategy, patterned after Fox’s and Scott’s 1984 archaeological investigations of the Battle of Little Bighorn, proved superior (Scott and Fox 1987).  The LAMAR Institute strategy consisted not only of systematic shovel test survey and limited ground penetrating radar survey, but also included controlled metal detector survey and recordation following critical site environmental prep work, such as bush-hogging and site plowing in historic plowzone areas.