Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue
statue formerly in Nashville, Tennessee, United States
The Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue was a controversial 25-foot (7.6 m) equestrian statue of Confederate Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest publicly displayed for 23 years (1998–2021) along Interstate 65 in Nashville, Tennessee. The controversial work was located on a narrow strip of private land in Nashville's Crieve Hall area and was prominently visible from I-65 at 701D Hogan Road. It was displayed alongside 13 flags representing the Confederacy and various Southern states. The work, by amateur sculptor Jack Kershaw, was widely mocked by national media for its crude craftsmanship and attracted decades of controversy and repeated vandalism before being removed on December 7, 2021. Critics said the work's distorted facial features bore little resemblance to Forrest himself. The depiction showed Forrest mounted on a rearing horse holding a sword aloft in his right hand and a pistol in his left.
The statue's owner, Nashville businessman William C. “Bill” Dorris, died in November 2020, bequeathing the statue to the Battle of Nashville Trust (BONT), a non-profit historical organization dedicated to preserving Battle of Nashville battlefield. In 2021, the Trust announced the statue was disassembled and removed from the site with no plans for its reinstallation. The Confederate flags, commonly referred to as the "Stars and Bars", remained until 2024, at which time they were replaced with current state flags representing both Union and Confederate states that participated in the 1864 Battle of Nashville.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.