Franklin resident Tod Carter was mortally wounded five hundred feet from his boyhood home

Tod Carter is the middle child in the Carter family, who had enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861. By 1864, he was the assistant quartermaster to Brigadier General Thomas Benton Smith in the Army of Tennessee, participating in the Battle of Franklin. When the Army of Tennessee crossed the Georgia-Tennessee border, the soldiers were heartened by a sign on the side of the road that read “Tennessee, A Grave or A Free Home.” Those words must have had special meanings for Tod Carter, as he will get to see his family the next day.

However, he had to participate in a fight with Smith’s brigade as part of Bates’s division. Although Tod Carter’s quartermaster duties did not require him to fight, he would not hear of it. About five hundred feet from his front yard, Tod Carter was struck by a Union bullet and tumbled into the blood-soaked grass. After the day’s carnage had ended, the Carter family emerged from their cellar only to be greeted by General Smith with the news of Tod’s wounding. By lantern light, Smith and the Carters spent hours searching the corpse-strewn battlefield for the young captain. Dying and insensible, Tod was carried back to the Carter House near dawn and set down in his sister Annie’s room. He died the next day, just one of the nearly ten thousand family tragedies that the battle wrought.