Nearly 8K Boots Displayed to Honor Fallen Soldiers

Amy Cotta and her Franklin nonprofit, Memories of Honor, recently became the proud owners of nearly 8,000 individual combat boots and counting. 

Boots of Honor will be on display through May 20 at Bicentennial Park in Franklin from sunrise to sunset. Each boot symbolizes a soldier who died while in active duty since 9/11. 

U.S. Army base Fort Campbell in Clarksville had displayed the boots during Memorial Day for the past decade, but opted to replace the display in 2025. Now, under the ownership of Memories of Honor, the display is free and open to the general public for the first time. 

“These families — for the most part — already feel forgotten,” says Cotta, a Blue Star Marine mother. “They feel alone. They feel isolated. They feel like everybody has moved on. There was no way we could let this memorial end. For the last year, we've been working to make sure that these families didn't get that gut punch of the memorial going away.”

Boots will cover all 22,000 square feet of the park’s open-air pavilion, neatly lined in rows in chronological order. There’s also a book of boots, where people can identify if their loved one has a boot on the memorial, and if so, where it is located.  

On Sunday, Memories of Honor laid 21 new boots, including the latest 12 service members from the current Iran war, known as Operation Epic Fury. 

They’re also gradually replacing 800 boots reclaimed by military family members after the closure of the Fort Campbell memorial. Cotta tells Williamson Scene she wants families to have the boot of their loved one if they desire, and the organization will replace it so they are still represented in the installation. Some of the boots actually belonged to the soldiers they represent, and some of them are symbolic. Cotta is also working to add organizational tools, including an inventory system complete with barcodes for each boot. 

“We want to make sure that if at any time a family member does want their loved one’s boot, we'll know exactly where it is in our warehouse,” she says. “We'll be able to find it. We'll be able to pull it, we can ship it to them, and then we can flag it to be replaced at a later time.” 

The boot display, as it was formerly known, started as a memorial just for those killed in the line of duty, but has expanded to include those who died in training accidents or took their own lives. Cotta says anyone who died in or due to service can have a boot added to the memorial at the family’s request. 

“For these families, it's not just the boot, it is a representation of their loved one, of their service members,” Cotta says. “Some of these boots, their children were 2, 3 years old when they passed away, and they're now graduating from high school.”

It took two long work days to set up the boots in chronological order, and Memories of Honor needs more volunteers to pack them back up. While Cotta hopes to be back at Bicentennial Park in Franklin every year around Memorial Day, the nonprofit’s goal is to help people remember fallen veterans beyond Memorial Day, too.  

“We're still losing people every single day,” Cotta says. “Just because you don't hear it on the news doesn't mean that it's not happening. Literally, every single day, we're losing men and women to suicide. We're losing them to training accidents. Even if it's only one day a year, I think it's important for people to pause and to think about. … we are so so lucky to live here as Americans and to live free.” 

She continues, “I just hope people will, despite political lines or ideology, just stop for a moment and acknowledge these families.”