Clarksville, TN – February 18th, 2026, 2025 – Our 234th meeting. We continue our twenty-first year!!!
The next meeting of the Clarksville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 in our new home Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1410 Golf Club Lane just off Madison Street. This is next to Mericourt Park Baseball Complex just east of the Montgomery County Government Complex. The meeting room is just inside the covered entryway.
The meeting begins at 7:00pm and is always open to the public.
This month’s program – “What’s in the Ground Does Not Lie: How Metal Detecting Helps Us Validate What We Think We know”
Civil War relic hunters can be reviled and praised for what they do. The worst violate private property without asking, don’t fill in dug holes, etc. while the best are driven by the love of what historical artifacts they can find and what those artifacts do to begin, tell or complete a story.
As a professional archaeologist will state, ground evidence never lies. Indeed, artifacts in the ground can confirm what types of shells were used by certain batteries, what infantry unit and from what state fought or camped there based on buttons, belt plates and dropped rounds.
Stories and legends get passed down from generation to generation, soldier’s accounts of a battle site sometimes are inaccurate with the passage of time; what’s in the ground either validates the stories we thought we knew or creates a new story that should be told.
Our speaker this month, Bobby Whitson, loves finding relics. He documents everything that he finds, does research why he found it there, and then either validates what he thought he knew or identifies a new page of history which leads to more research.
His relic room pales in comparison to those that have been doing this for decades, but he has been fortunate to find some excellent artifacts and, more importantly, confirm certain “known” facts while identifying previously unknown and valuable historic information. We’ll discuss items found on the field at Nashville as well as on fields and campsites in other middle Tennessee areas.
Our speaker this month is Bobby Whitson, president of the Battle of Nashville Trust. Whitson is a graduate of Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville and Furman University in South Carolina. He is an 8th generation Tennessean belonging to a First Family of Tennessee. Husband to Danielle Neil of Brentwood for 31 years, father to three amazing daughters, Morgan, McLean, and Meredith, and grandfather to Tyler and Emory, Whitson is most at home on an athletic field or a battlefield.
A lifelong historian, Whitson is consumed with trying to understand the past in order to provide clarity on the present that leads to solid direction for the future.
Bobby Whitson is a 25-year Sports and Entertainment technology veteran/entrepreneur helping teams, leagues, and athletic departments manage their data more efficiently and effectively.
