The Confederacy’s hard-luck Army of Tennessee drew its strength from lower-ranking commanders like Colonel Calvin Harvey Walker of the 3rd Tennessee Infantry. Walker entered the war as a captain and rose in rank to colonel on September 26, 1862. Beloved by his men, he was not above poking fun at himself—and he earned a lasting nickname in the process. On May 12, 1863, just before the fight at Raymond, Miss., the 41-year-old colonel addressed his men, saying: “I wish to say that I do not command you to go, but to follow this old bald head of mine….” The name “Old Baldy” stuck.
At the September 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, Walker chided his disheartened regiment by removing his hat and calling out, “Boys, are you going to leave Old Baldy?” Regimental Chaplain Thomas H. Deavenport recalled that “the effect was electrical, every soldier rushed forward, everything was swept from before them.”
But the odds of war caught up to Walker during the Atlanta Campaign on June 22, 1864, when the 3rd Tennessee was about three miles southwest of Marietta, Ga., near Peter Kolb’s farm along the Powder Springs Road. Just before 5 p.m., a jagged chunk of a Union shell struck the colonel in the face and, according to eyewitnesses, “blew off all his head except chin and rather long whiskers.” The impact was so violent that a fragment of Walker’s skull wounded a nearby officer. “Never did I see soldiers weep so over a man,” wrote Chaplain Deavenport. “He had been like a father to them.”
Walker was buried south of Atlanta, in Griffin, Ga. When his remains were reinterred near Columbia, Tenn., late in 1865, his coffin was draped with the 3rd Tennessee’s battle flag, accompanied by his sword, belt rig, dragoon revolver and New Testament—all of which were given to his widow. That flag is now in the Tennessee State Museum Collection. The other artifacts remained in Walker’s family until the 1950s or 1960s, when Jack Shelton sold the sword and belt to collector Sydney Kerksis. Shelton also sold Walker’s revolver, diary and a photo of Walker and his brother (their whereabouts are currently unknown). Kerksis sold or traded the sword to Fred Slayton, in whose collection it remained for 20 years. When Kerksis died in 1980, Beverly DuBose Jr. purchased much of his collection, including Walker’s belt rig—among 7,500 objects in the DuBose Collection donated to the Atlanta History Center in 1985. Bill Beard, meanwhile, purchased the colonel’s sword in 2009, following Slayton’s death, and Walker’s New Testament ended up in James Newton Shelton’s possession in Homerville, Ga.
In 2009 Beard discovered that Walker’s Leech & Rigdon belt was part of the Atlanta History Center’s collection and revealed that he owned the colonel’s impressive-looking sword. In February 2010, Beard displayed the sword along with his Leech & Rigdon collectibles at a show in Dalton, Ga., which drew the attention of Civil War blogger Phil Gast.
James Shelton’s 14-year-old daughter Sarah came upon Gast’s blog, “Civil War Picket,” while searching for information about her ancestor, Colonel Walker. Though her family had Walker’s New Testament, she knew nothing about his sword, belt rig and revolver until reading Gast’s blog. She contacted the Atlanta History Center, and an agreement was soon reached to reunite her ancestor’s effects.
Today the sword, belt and New Testament are together for the first time in 150 years, on display at the center: a very fitting tribute to a hard-fighting Tennessean.
Bill Beard has been collecting Civil War weapons since 1949. Keith S. Bohannon teaches at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Ga. Gordon L. Jones is senior military curator at the Atlanta History Center.
Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
