The Alabama home of Gen. Joseph Wheeler will be the topic at the regular monthly meeting of the Chattanooga Civil War Round Table.
It will be Tuesday, August 19, at 7 p.m. in the Millis-Evans Room of Caldwell Hall on the campus of The McCallie School on Missionary Ridge (enter the McCallie Campus off Dodds Avenue at the end of Bailey Avenue and follow the signs to the Academic Quadrangle).
Wheeler home Curator Myers Brown will be the speaker and he will talk both about Fighting Joe Wheeler and his post-Civil War home in North Alabama.
The meeting is free and open to the public.
Joseph Wheeler is one of the most important figures in the history of the Army of Tennessee and in the 1863 Campaign for Chattanooga. Like John K. Jackson about whom we learned earlier this year, Wheeler was an Augusta, Georgia, native, having been born on September 10, 1836 (he, like William S. Rosecrans, celebrated a birthday as the Campaign for Chattanooga unfolded). He graduated from the United State Military Academy at West Point in 1859 and was not yet two years into a career in the United State Army when the secession of his native state and the other Deep South states caused him to resign his 2nd lieutenant’s commission and join the newly forming Confederate Army. Appointed initially to an artillery lieutenant’s position, he, in September, 1861, was made Colonel of the 19th Alabama, thus beginning an Alabama association that would characterize him the rest of his life. He led the 19th at Shiloh but then transferred to the cavalry. While still a colonel, Braxton Bragg appointed the young Georgian/Alabamian to the post of Chief of Cavalry, Army of Mississippi, on July 13, 1862. Thus would begin the exploits that would give him the recognition he has today. Wounded three times himself, having thirty-six staff officers fall at his side, and having sixteen horses shot from under him, the five foot five inch Wheeler was often at the very point of the sword, the heat of the action. Although not without some points of controversy, Wheeler and the cavalry of the Army of Tennessee became linked into history.
Marrying a wealthy Lawrence County, Alabama, widow in 1866, "Fighting Joe" Wheeler established himself as a planter and public servant in that North Alabama section, serving eight terms in Congress. He died at age sixty-nine in 1906 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Today, Wheeler’s post-war home survives as a state historic site and shrine to the great Confederate cavalryman. Twelve historic structures remain and are presently undergoing extensive restoration to ensure their long term survival. You can visit the site’s web page at www.wheelerplantation.org. Our talk this evening will address both the man and general and his North Alabama estate.
Myers Brown is a Tennessee native. He holds a Masters Degree in Historic Preservation from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Formerly Assistant Military Curator at the Atlanta History Center in Atlanta, he is now the Curator at Pond Spring, the Alabama State Historic Site at Joseph Wheeler’s post-war home in Hillsboro, Ala.