Carrie Winder McGavock

Carrie Winder McGavock was the mistress of Carnton, the McGavock family home near Franklin, Tennessee, and became closely associated with the aftermath of the Battle of Franklin in 1864. During the battle Carnton was turned into a large field hospital, and Carrie and her household helped care for wounded Confederate soldiers.

After the war Carrie and her husband John provided land for a cemetery where nearly 1,500 Confederate dead from the Franklin battlefield were reinterred. She kept the cemetery records and cared for the graves for decades, work that later earned her the popular epithet “Widow of the South”.

In Robert Hicks’ The Orphan Mother, Formerly enslaved by Carrie McGavock’s family, she owns property and serves women across the town’s racial divisions. In Robert Hicks’ The Widow of the South, Carrie McGavock’s home at Carnton is taken over as a Confederate field hospital when John Bell Hood sends the Army of Tennessee against entrenched Union troops.