Unique Confederate calendar created

Thanks to Milton Clarke, the “great snowball battle” of 1864 in Dalton during the Civil War is now memorialized — 147 years later — in a 2012 Confederate calendar.

“The calendar is focused on the Confederacy,” said Clarke, a Civil War buff whose Little Rome restaurant in Chatsworth also serves as a museum of historical photos and local landmark memorabilia. “My wife, Melanie, had bought Civil War-related calendars for me before, but most of them leaned toward the Union and had a bias. So I started researching books at night around our living room table.”

Fortunately, Melanie had just catalogued the collection of around 300 “War Between the States”-themed books, and it didn’t take Milton, who’s known as “Clarke” at the restaurant, long to realize what was needed. The couple undertook a mission and traveled throughout the Southeast during the last two years, taking photos of monuments and dropping in on conventions to gather information and herald the project.

The 2012 calendar theme, with the states taking calendar months chronologically in the order they seceded from the Union, came as a “light bulb moment” for someone who still has the first newspaper article about the Civil War he saved in 1963. For instance, South Carolina was the first state to secede so its battle flag and a monument are featured for January. Georgia was the fifth state to secede, so its observance is in May. February is a salute to Black History Month.

“We ‘Googled’ ahead to find courthouses (on trips),” said Melanie, “but many times we had to find where the old courthouse stood to find the monument. We took many detours off the main drag, and got lost on a country road one time for two hours and could never find a place to turn right or left.”

Interesting facts

Along the way, Clarke has learned many facts he never knew about the war — or had forgotten.

“One thing that was unusual was that (Confederate commanding general) Robert E. Lee had his citizenship reinstated in 1975 by President (Gerald) Ford, and (Confederate president) Jefferson Davis got his citizenship back in 1978 by President (Jimmy) Carter,” he said. Both dates are in the calendar.

He also discovered the worst maritime disaster in U. S. history — one that actually took more lives than the sinking of the Titanic. But because of other significant moments at the end of the Civil War, the USS Sultana’s demise on April 27, 1865, with 1,800 lives lost to an explosion and subsequent drownings is barely remembered.

“Lee surrendered in early April and then Lincoln was assassinated less than a week later,” Clarke said of the era. “That steamship had about 2,100 people on it — most of them Union soldiers who had been prisoners of war — and it exploded and went down near Memphis on the Mississippi River. But most people have never even heard of it.”

Also noted in the calendar is the last Confederate flag lowered on a warship.

“The job of the USS Shenandoah was to sink merchant ships and ‘whalers’ off the coast of Alaska,” he said. “They didn’t know the war had ended, and when one ship told them it had been over for two months the crew didn’t believe them and sank the ship anyway. They ran into a British ship that showed them a newspaper with the news, but the crew thought that if they turned themselves in they would be tried as pirates and hung.”

Clarke said the Shenandoah then “circumnavigated the globe” to England.

“The last official Confederate ship lowered the last Confederate flag in Liverpool in November of 1865,” he said.

Other little-known facts, according to Clarke, are that most Southern states observe their Confederate Memorial Days on different dates, and that Lee was actually against slavery.

“He didn’t own slaves, and when he received some as an inheritance he emancipated them,” Clarke said. “A well-known story is about Lee going to church after the war. The way things were back then was the blacks sat in the balcony and sang while the white folks took communion, then the whites sang while the black folks took communion. While one of the black men was taking communion, Lee stood up and went forward. The whole church tensed up, but Lee kneeled beside the man and took communion with him — signifying it was time for blacks and whites to live and worship together.”

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Calendars for sale

The 2012 Confederate Memorial Calendar is on sale for $15, or two for $25, at Little Rome restaurant, 1201 N. Third Ave. in Chatsworth. Little Rome has a Facebook page, and Milton Clarke said his son, Tyler Hord, is working on a Confederate Memorial Calendar link.

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