Bill Dorris died on November 24, 2020. His will contained two notable provisions.
The first: he left approximately $5 million in trust for the care of his eight-year-old border collie, Lulu.
The second: he left the statue and the 3.5-acre strip of land on Hogan Road to the Battle of Nashville Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the battlefield sites of the 1864 Battle of Nashville.
On December 7, 2021 — twenty-three years and five months after the statue went up — the Trust took it down.
Their statement was precise and devastating. They gave four reasons, and noted that “each reason sets aside the contentious debate about Forrest as a person or as a Confederate general”:
- Forrest was not present at the Battle of Nashville.
- The statue is ugly and a blight on Nashville.
- It has been vandalized, is in disrepair, and is dangerous.
- Because of its divisive nature, having the statue in a prominent location distracts from the mission of the Battle of Nashville Trust.
In a separate statement, the Trust added that “even Forrest himself would think it was ugly.”
There’s something almost too perfect about the way it ended.
For twenty-three years, the statue had been legally untouchable. It sat on private property. No government could remove it. The Metro Council couldn’t even plant trees to block the view. Bill Dorris, the man who called slavery “social security,” who had 1,800-foot flagpoles ready in case anyone tried to obstruct his monument — he was the wall.
And then the wall died, and left five million dollars to a dog.
The statue was damaged during removal. It’s in storage somewhere. The Trust says it will never be remounted or displayed. The thirteen Confederate flags stayed up for a few more years — a legal squabble between the Trust and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to whom Dorris had left a small building on the site. In 2024, the flags finally came down, replaced with the current state flags of both Union and Confederate states that actually fought at the Battle of Nashville.
The 3.5-acre property was sold in 2023 to a private LLC. The sculptor, Jack Kershaw — James Earl Ray’s lawyer, co-founder of the League of the South, the man who said “somebody needs to say a good word for slavery” — had died in 2010 at 96.
Everyone who built this thing is dead now. The statue is in a storage unit. The dog got five million dollars.
Nashville doesn’t have a word for what the Hamburglar was. It wasn’t a monument — it was too ugly. It wasn’t satire — it was too sincere. It wasn’t heritage — Forrest didn’t fight at the Battle of Nashville. It was a polyurethane fever dream carved with a butcher knife by a white nationalist, erected on a strip of land between an interstate and a railroad track, surrounded by Confederate flags, and maintained for two decades by a man who compared chattel slavery to a retirement plan.
And it came down because a border collie named Lulu outlived her owner.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons