The Chattanooga Civil War Round Table will hold its regular monthly meeting on Tuesday. The meeting is at 7 p.m. and will be held at the Orchard Knob Reservation of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. The Orchard Knob Reservation is at the corner of Orchard Knob Avenue and Ivy Street, along Orchard Knob Avenue between Third Street and McCallie Avenue.
Exhibit Specialist Scott Jones and Conservator Hector Abreu are the speakers. They will speak about the work that they and their team are doing to preserve and restore the monuments at the Orchard Knob Reservation. The meeting is free and open to the public.
What happened here in the shadow of Lookout Mountain in the later summer and fall of 1863 was significant in determining the outcome of the War for Southern Independence/War of the Rebellion. Those who experienced the Campaign for Chattanooga as it unfolded knew even then just how significant it was. Many visited the ground hallowed by themselves and their comrades within hours, days, and months of those battles and they continued to do so in the two and a half decades after the war. In the 1890s, those men's and their nation's recognition of those events led to the creation of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park and the erection of more than a 1,000 monuments, markers, tablets, and plaques across those battlefields. In the century since, time and some visitors have not necessarily been kind to all of those commemorative features. And, even with durable materials by and large having been selected, even granite monuments need some tender loving care too. As you hopefully have seen in the local media, some of the larger monuments are receiving that care this summer on the Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge battlefields; its making those monuments look almost new. For our program this month, we'll get a tour and talk of what is being done for some of the monuments within the Orchard Knob Reservation by two of the experts doing the work. Orchard Knob has been closed during this process but we'll get to visit under the escort of the crew and get to see and hear up close what they've been up to and what they've been finding.
Museum Exhibit Specialist and team leader Scott Jones is a Navy (seven years) and construction trades veteran. Joining the National Park Service in Florida in 1990, he transferred to the Historic Preservation Training Center in 1997 and has since worked on may historic preservation projects around the National Park System, including at Stones River National Battlefield.
Conservator Hector Abreu was born in New York but raised in Puerto Rico. Trained as a civil engineer at the University of Puerto Rico, he returned to school to study architectural conservation at the University of Pennsylvania. Since, he has done conservation work or taught conservation for the University of Pennsylvania, the Puerto Rico State Historic Preservation Office, Savannah College of Art and Design, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and as a private consultant.