Missionary Ridge Cyclorama (Chattanooga, TN)
On November 23, 1863, General Braxton Bragg ordered the Confederate Army of Tennessee to retreat from Lookout Mountain and take up a new defensive position on the nearby Missionary Ridge. When attempts to turn the Confederate flanks failed on November 25, Ulysses S. Grant ordered a frontal assault on the position. This assault broke through the center of Bragg’s lines forcing the Army of Tennessee to retreat.
As panorama painting became increasingly popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century, William Wehner founded the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The studio’s first project was to capture the cataclysmic events of the “Storming of Missionary Ridge.” Designed by August Lohr of Munich and F. W. Heine of Dresden, the painting was completed in 1886 by a team of approximately 20 artists. The painting was first mounted in Chicago across the street from Paul Philippoteaux’s Gettysburg Cyclorama, and later toured to Kansas City, Chattanooga and Atlanta. In 1892 it was placed on display in Nashville, Tennessee where it was destroyed by a tornado.
H. H. Bennett, Wisconsin’s renowned landscape photographer, traveled to Kansas City in the late 1880s to create a unique photographic record of the Missionary Ridge Cyclorama.
View Bennett’s Missionary Ridge Cyclorama for a gallery of images. When viewed left to right and top to bottom, the images are in order as one would have viewed the cyclorama.
Choose from the links below to view each scene separately.
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