The stillness is eerie at the Slaughter Pen, a cedar-dotted grove of limestone boulders where Union soldiers were penned in and gunned down by Confederate troops during the multiday Battle of Stones River, which began on December 31,1862. A self-guided walking tour meanders through this sprawling park, ultimately the site of a key Union victory and one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War, with 25,525 killed, wounded or captured.
The adjacent Stone River National Cemetery holds the graves of more than 6100 Union soldiers. The path of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the forced march of thousands of Cherokee to the West in the 1830s, runs alongside the park.
