The Chattanooga Civil War Round Table will hold its March meeting on Tuesday, March 16, 2010.

The meeting is at 7 PM and will be held in the Millis-Evans Room of Caldwell Hall on the campus of the McCallie School. Enter the McCallie School campus on Dodds Avenue and follow the signs to the Academic Quadrangle.

Historian, educator, and Park Ranger Christopher Young is the speaker. Ranger Young will speak on Alabama Confederate General Sterling Alexander Martin 'S. A. M.' Wood. The meeting is free and open to the public.

It is almost always overlooked, but Alabamian Sterling Alexander Martin Wood (whose 187th birthday is the day after our meeting) was one of the first Confederate operational commanders in our region's Civil War story. When Unionist struck at the Western & Atlantic Railroad in early November, 1861, burning two bridges on that strategic road, Colonel S. A. M. Wood was sent here with his 7th Alabama Infantry to crush the Unionist up-rising and safe-guard the W & A and the equally vital East Tennessee & Georgia RR. A year and a half later, he would be back in the Chattanooga area, as the commander of an Alabama and Mississippi brigade in Pat Cleburne's Division, and would soon thereafter fight the last battle of his Civil War in the woods and occasional fields of the valley of the "River of Death" a dozen miles south of town. In between, S. A. M. Wood had had a promising but checkered career, one that has left him as one of the lesser understood long-time figures of the Army of Tennessee.

In his talk this evening, historian, educator, and Park Ranger Chris Young will take us S. A. M. Wood's career. He'll look at the little different up-bringing of Wood and a pre-war career that might suggest some of what Wood would experience during the war. Fortunately, for us and Chris, Wood's wartime letters survive and Chris is hard at work preparing them for publication and researching the clues they contain. You'll come away with a better understanding of this interesting figure in the Army of Tennessee's history.

Christopher P. Young, like S. A. M. Wood is an Alabamian, from Piedmont, Calhoun County. He is a graduate of Jacksonville State University, where, in addition to history and archeology, he has studied to be a secondary education teacher. For several years while in college, he worked as a seasonal interpreter at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park and presently holds a term Park Ranger position there.