For twenty-two years now, a roomful of Clarksville residents has been gathering once a month to argue about troop movements, admire battle flags, and listen to someone who has spent decades in the archives tell them something they did not know. On Wednesday, October 21st, the Clarksville Civil War Roundtable convenes for the 242nd time. The meeting starts at 7:00 pm at the group's new home, Cumberland Presbyterian Church at 1410 Golf Club Lane, just off Madison Street next to the Mericourt Park baseball complex and east of the Montgomery County Government Complex. The meeting room is just inside the covered entryway. As always, it is free and open to the public, and members are urged to bring a friend or two.
The 242nd program is titled "Tennessee's Civil War Ghosts: Because Old Soldiers Never Die," and it comes with a small piece of behind-the-scenes drama. The roundtable's originally scheduled speaker is relocating from Middle Tennessee to St. Louis and had to cancel; the group hopes to have him back in the future. Stepping in is one of their own, Karel Lea Biggs, who has been collecting ghost stories and the books that contain them for years.
Biggs is a familiar figure in Clarksville education. She holds degrees in business and education from Cal Poly Pomona, Wright State University, and Cumberland University, taught middle school in Clarksville for 22 years, and retired in 2025. She is now Director of Professional Learning for Professional Educators of Tennessee and an adjunct professor and university supervisor at Austin Peay State University, where she coaches student teachers.
The roundtable's origins go back to a notice posted in early 2004 announcing that a Clarksville chapter was being formed, with a first meeting planned for February of that year. What began as a monthly gathering of enthusiasts has turned into one of the longer-running institutions of its kind in the region, now in its twenty-second year and past its 240th consecutive program. Along the way it has met in a succession of borrowed rooms, from the Customs House Museum downtown to the Bone & Joint Center on Professional Park Drive, before settling into the church on Golf Club Lane.
That peripatetic history is typical of the Civil War roundtable movement, which was born in Chicago in 1940 when Ralph G. Newman, a rare book and autograph dealer whose Abraham Lincoln Book Shop counted Carl Sandburg among its customers, decided to host monthly dinners with like-minded enthusiasts and invite historians to lecture afterward. The idea spread across the country, North and South, and eventually to some 300 chapters worldwide. No national body ever governed them; each roundtable runs on its own, which is why they vary so much in character. By tradition they offer speakers and book raffles, fund preservation efforts, stage battlefield tours, and hand out awards. Chicago's Nevins-Freeman Award remains one of the most prestigious lifetime honors in the field.
Clarksville's chapter sits atop ground that gives ghost stories plenty to work with. The town fell to Union forces early in the war and spent most of it under occupation, and Fort Defiance, the earthwork above the confluence of the Cumberland and Red rivers, changed hands more than once. Middle Tennessee more broadly was the site of some of the war's bitterest fighting and its longest, strangest aftermaths, which is precisely the sort of landscape that accumulates tales.
The roundtable's own announcement makes the case for the topic's durability. Ghost stories sell; walk into any bookstore or scroll through Amazon and the shelf of haunted-state and haunted-city volumes keeps growing. The Civil War is no exception, and the late Blue & Gray Magazine ran three issues on the subject that ranked among its most popular. Tennessee has its own hoard of such accounts, and that is what Biggs will walk the room through on Wednesday night.
There is also some housekeeping. The roundtable's fiscal year begins in July, so dues are due at this meeting, and members who are current will receive their new name badges. The group is plainly pleased with its new venue, describing it in its own announcement as "terrific."
For anyone who has never been, the format is simple: show up a little before 7:00 pm, find the room inside the covered entry, and take a seat. No reservation is required and no membership is necessary to listen. The subject matter this month happens to be the one corner of Civil War history that requires no prior reading, only a willingness to be a little spooked — which may be exactly why the roundtable, 242 meetings in, is still recruiting.