Shiloh National Military Park

• 1. Introduction

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  Shiloh National Military Park, in Hardin County, Tennessee, owes part of its existence to a group of irritated farmers and their pigs. The farmers worked land where a Civil War battle had been fought. Their animals kept rooting up the remains of soldiers who had fallen there. They insisted that the federal government do something about it. Behind that blunt complaint lies a battle that shaped the war in the West. Why does the battlefield carry the name of a small church? Who is buried in its cemetery? And what lay beyond the park's borders, in Mississippi, that made this fight matter so much?

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• 2. Two Days in April

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  About 65,000 Union troops took part at Shiloh, under the command of Ulysses S. Grant and Don Carlos Buell. Facing them were 44,000 Confederates led by Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard. Johnston was killed in the fighting. The battle ran for two days, the 6th and the 7th of April 1862, and it ranks among the first major battles of the Western Theater.

  Nearly 24,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing by the end. Even so, neither army won a decisive tactical victory. The Union held the battlefield, but it failed to pursue the Confederate forces as they withdrew. Strategically, the result was very different. The Confederates had massed to oppose Grant's and Buell's invasion through Tennessee, and they suffered a decisive defeat.

  The Union side did not even use the name Shiloh for the fight.

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• 3. A Church and a Landing

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  Union soldiers called the fight "The Battle of Pittsburg Landing." Pittsburg Landing is the spot on the Tennessee River where their forces came ashore for the battle.

  The name Shiloh came from somewhere else. Shiloh Methodist Church, a small log church standing near the landing, gave the battlefield its lasting name.

  Today the main section of the park sits in the unincorporated community of Shiloh, about 9 miles south of Savannah, Tennessee. The park does not stop there.

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• 4. The Road to Corinth

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  Corinth, Mississippi, lies 23 miles southwest of Shiloh, and the battle began a six-month struggle for its railroad junction. In May, Union forces marched out from Pittsburg Landing and took Corinth after a siege. In October, they withstood a Confederate counter-attack. The junction was critical, and the Confederates never won it back.

  The park now reaches well past Shiloh. Sites tied to the Corinth battlefield were added to it on the 22nd of September 2000. The Parker's Crossroads Battlefield, in the city of Parkers Crossroads, Tennessee, is another additional area. The Siege and Battle of Corinth Sites were designated a National Historic Landmark on the 6th of May 1991.

  At Shiloh itself, a national cemetery holds many who never left.

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• 5. Burying the Dead

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  Shiloh National Cemetery contains 3,584 Union dead, and 2,357 of them are unknown. Their remains were reinterred in 1866, in a cemetery created after the war. The grounds cover 20.09 acres.

  Only two Confederate dead lie in the cemetery. An unknown number of Confederate soldiers rest instead in mass graves elsewhere in the park.

  The cemetery sits in the northeast corner of the park, right beside the visitor center and bookstore.

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• 6. Making a Park

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  On the 27th of December 1894, Shiloh National Military Park was established. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Basil W. Duke as its commissioner. Federal oversight changed hands on the 10th of August 1933, when the park moved from the War Department to the National Park Service. On the 15th of October 1966, the military park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as is true of all historic areas the Park Service administers.

  The park totals 3,997 acres. Of those, 3,942 acres are federal land and 55 acres are not.

  The American Battlefield Trust has kept the park growing. Together with federal, state, and local partners, it had acquired and preserved 1,554 acres of the battlefield by early 2024. That work took more than 26 separate transactions since 2001. Most of the land was sold or conveyed to the National Park Service and folded into the park.

  The National Park Travelers Club held its 2013 convention at Shiloh.

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• 7. Walking the Ground

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  A self-guided auto-tour of 12 miles winds through the park. Its stops include the Peach Orchard, the Hornet's Nest, and the site where General Johnston died. The visitor center adds permanent exhibitions, films, and displays for anyone preparing to drive it.

  People lived on this land long before 1862. The well preserved Shiloh Indian Mounds Site lies within the battlefield's boundaries, and it is a National Historic Landmark in its own right. It was inhabited during the Early Mississippian period, from about 1000 to 1450 CE. That occupation ended centuries before a log church gave the battlefield its name.

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