John Watkins, of the Nineteenth Ohio Battery, which was held in reserve during the fight, survived the war and attended a Knoxville reunion in 1895. He saw the beginning of the end of the red-clay fort and wrote home about it:

“Went to Fort Sanders, looked the place over and talked with old soldiers and some other people about it, but it will soon be of the past — boys are helping to tear down the parapets to find bullets and they get lots of them…. We can locate the place where our gun stood all right, now there is a big house built within 100 feet of it and a road is graded right through the works between where we were.”

And now, of course, all that’s left is a neighborhood of houses, streets, and an adjoining medical center.