The next meeting of the Nashville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Monday, June 15th, 2009, in the visitor’s center of Ft. Negley Park, a unit of Metro Parks, Nashville, TN. This is located off I-65 just south of downtown between 4th Avenue South and 8th Avenue South on Edgehill Avenue/Chestnut Avenue. Take Exit 81, Wedgewood Avenue, off I-65 and follow the signs to the Science Museum. The meeting begins at 7:00 PM and is always open to the public. Members please bring a friend or two – new recruits are always welcomed.
Our program:
State Historian and author, Walter T. Durham, will do a presentation on Nashville's Fort Negley. A vital part of the Union defenses of Nashville, Ft. Negley has recently been restored and opened as a city park. Mr. Durham will tell the story of the fort during the war. Considering that we are, as far as we know, are one of the very few CWRTs that meets at an actual Civil War site, it is quite appropriate that one of our first presentations will be on this important piece of Nashville history.
Retired Gallatin businessman and public affairs activist, Walter T. Durham has been engaged in writing Tennessee history for the past forty years. Holder of the B.A. and M.A. degrees from Vanderbilt University, he is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha honorary societies. During World War II, he served with the Air Force in Italy and Africa. He has received national honors in the business community for his leadership in the manufacture and sales of building materials. He is a former chairman of the Tennessee Historical Commission and a past president of the Tennessee Historical Society.
Durham published The Great Leap Westward in 1969, the first of his nineteen Tennessee books, three of which were done with collaborators. His works have received several awards. His Civil War books include Rebellion Revisited, A History of Sumner County, Tennessee, From 1861 to 1870; Nashville The Occupied City; and Reluctant Partners, Nashville and the Union. The University of Tennessee Press has just republished the latter two volumes.
He has written more than one hundred articles for magazines, journals, and newspapers, and he has contributed entries to Simon and Schuster's Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, 1993, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, 1998. He has written chapters for other books and a number of book reviews. Durham has been State Historian since 2002.
We hope to see you there.
Greg Biggs
Nashville CWRT