Montgomery Bell State Park, Burns, TN
We spent the 4th of July week at Montgomery Bell State Park in Burns, Tennessee, just 30 miles west of Nashville. Having never been to Tennessee, I was so excited to see the sights. Our first day there turned out to be an unusual one! With an unusually large amount of sheriff’s department, park rangers on foot and on horseback, and a large mobile trailer labeled ‘Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’ we thought maybe we had missed the banjo music or they were raiding stills in the area! Lol. Turns out the annual convention for the “National Solutions Conference” rented out the conference center, inn and restaurant in the state park for the weekend. This is a White Supremacist group and they had the KKK grand wizard, David Duke, as the keynote speaker along with speakers from “Make America White Again” and South African white nationalists. As you can imagine huge protests were expected and the police force was there to keep the peace. Our campground was full and thankfully away from the convention center so we were not involved except for the experience. We were in town shopping, etc. so we were able to miss most of it.
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