(Directions to Caldwell Hall-Enter the McCallie School campus off of Dodds Avenue opposite the end of Bailey Avenue. Take the main drive into the campus and follow the signs for the Academic Quadrangle. There is a parking area there beside the Chapel and you will have passed Caldwell Hall on the right as you approach the parking area. Find a place and park. Caldwell Hall will be behind you as you park. Come in either the first or second floor doors and follow the signs to the Millis-Evans Room.)

Well, several entities are working on doing just that. Under the leadership of Chickamauga City Manager John Culpepper, Walker County, Dade County, the City of Fort Oglethorpe, the Coosa Valley Regional Development Center have initiated an effort to create the "Chickamauga Campaign Trail." Designed to highlight some of the many sites that are landmarks for the events that led up to the Battle of Chickamauga, it is modeled after similar trails in Virginia and Maryland and those being put in place in other parts of Georgia. John and his partners hope to be able to entice folks to get off I-24 and I-59 west of Lookout Mountain and perhaps other routes too and then to follow one or more routes much as the one or both of the armies did in coming over the mountain and through the valleys to the banks of the "River of Death." John will explain what is planned and show us how members of the Round Table can potentially help. It's a project with real promise. Come out and learn about it as it's just getting started.

John Culpepper is the City Manager of the City of Chickamauga,Georgia. He is also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the 37th Georgia Living History group. He's taken on the role of trying to guard the Glass's Mill battlefield from development, is helping the City of Chickamauga become a gateway community to the Chickamauga Battlefield, and worked with Walker County to reserve to the county the option of possibly having a public corridor into historic Worthen's Gap in Pigeon Mountain.

Georgia Civil War Heritage Trails:

www.gcwht.org/index.html

Vicksburg Campaign trail:

www.battleofraymond.org/trail/

Lee vs. Grant: The 1864 Overland campaign Tour:

www.civilwar-va.com/virginia/va-central/1865tour.html

Lee's Retreat:

www.civilwar-va.com/virginia/va-retreat/retreat.html

There are four items again this month for the Speaker's Fund. The first item is a copy of Chickamauga, by Raymond Evans, a history of the events in the area of Crawfish Spring, now the City of Chickamauga. The second item is a copy of Earl S. Miers' The Web of Victory: Grant at Vicksburg. The third item is a copy of Nat and Bucky Hughes' Quiet Places: The Burial Sites of Civil War Generals in Tennessee. The fourth item is all six issues of America's Civil War magazine from 1998 with such articles as "Last Rebel Stand at Fort Blakely," "Prelude to Chickamauga: Battle of Davis' Cross Roads," and "Beauregard and the Beast at Drewry's Bluff." The last three items this month were donated to the Round Table to support the Speaker's Fund. To those donors go our thanks. Proceeds from the Speaker's Fund go toward bringing speakers in from outside the area. Your support of the Speaker's Fund is appreciated.

As related last month in these columns, members of the relatively new (less than two years old) Round Table in Clarksville, Tennessee, have made a proposal to our Round Table and a number of others in Tennessee and North Alabama to jointly sponsor a regional conference each year. This proposal is similar to what several Round Tables do in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio (the Midwest Civil War Conference), as several do in California. Beyond just hosting a day or two of speakers, the Clarksville proposal notes that there would be the ability to include battlefield tours as part of the conference. The conference would move from place to place each year with one Round Table and perhaps another historical organization being responsible for organizing it. The proposal emailed to us is rather long; too long to include here in full. Harvey, however, has posted it on our website so it can be read in full. I would encourage you to do so. At our meeting again this month we can continue a discussion of the issue and see if it is something we want to undertake. Please read the proposal at:

Only at the beginning of the week before the February meeting did I learn that the Chattanooga Regional History Museum was indeed again conducting its David H. Gray History Fair and that they would like us to participate. It was scheduled for Saturday, March 5. I told the museum staff person who called that we hadn't heard from them about it up to that point but that we would discuss it at the up-coming February meeting. Those members present in February did so and decided that given the late date of the invitation that we would not participate this year. I'll get with the museum staff soon and explain the situation. If they want us to continue to participate, it would be nice if the notice was timely enough to allow the fact that the Round Table is sponsoring a special prize for the best entry on a Civil War subject to be included in the promotional material sent to the schools. Other than hearing that they had a hard time getting sufficient judges, I haven't heard any reports about this year's History Fair.

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of War Between the States history coming on on television in the next couple of weeks. C-SPAN's Book TV didn't have full schedules up yet for the coming weeks and none of what they had listed was 19th century. At the History Channel, the closest thing is the Battlefield Detectives episode "Custer at Little Big Horn" which will air on Saturday, March 12, 2005, at 9 A.M. With Book TV, you might want to check back on Friday.

April 19, 2005 - Celeste Dixon, Park Ringer, Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, "Appomattox"
May 17, 2005 - Evan Jones, University of Virginia, "Going Home: Soldiers become Civilians"
June 21, 2005 - Bill Scaife, "Joe Brown's Pets: The Georgia Militia"
July 19, 2005 - To be announced
August 16, 2005 - To be announced
September 20, 2005 - To be announced
October 18, 2005 - Dr. Kit Rushing, "Civil War Memoirist Fanny Andrews' A Family Secret"
November 15, 2005 - Harvey Scarborough, "Thomas' Demonstration Takes Orchard Knob"
December 20, 2005 - To be announced

November 10-12, 2005--13th Annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, sponsored by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's Department of Communications; more details later