Tales from the road: 'Is this the Liberty Gap battlefield'?

Perry Sanders stands where he unearthed a cannon ball on the Liberty Gap battlefield.

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At 10:15 Sunday morning, I streak down Liberty Pike, a couple miles from Bell Buckle, Tennessee — home of an annual MoonPie Festival and the Bell Buckle Cafe, one of the best restaurants in America for country cooking and stellar conversation. Then I spy two gents standing by a farm gate and an ancient, green pickup, metal detectors dangling from their hands.

“Is this the Liberty Gap battlefield?” I ask the pair after rolling down my window. I know the answer to my own question, of course, having explored this area roughly a half-dozen times. My question is simply an icebreaker.

New pal Perry Sanders and I at Liberty Gap.

After small talk, I introduce myself to Perry, a 71-year-old retired plumber from Shelbyville, and Chuck, a 60ish dude and Perry’s longtime pal. Based on my extensive gabbing with relic hunters over the years, I expect an earful about their latest finds and the unmarked Liberty Gap battlefield. Neither disappoints.

“See that field over there?” says Perry, pointing to an expanse as flat as the backside of a skillet. “500 bullets found over there.” From June 24-26, 1863, out here in the wilds an hour’s drive southeast of Nashville — “God’s country,” Chuck calls it — the armies clashed in a Tullahoma Campaign battle that gets stiff-armed in the history books. Few casualties resulted — perhaps no more than 75 Confederate dead and 60 prisoners. The Union Army suffered fewer casualties.

“The affair at Liberty Gap will always be considered a skirmish,” Union Brigadier General Richard Johnson wrote, “but few skirmishes ever equaled it in severity.”

With a farmer’s permission, Perry and Chuck have hunted this portion of the Liberty Gap battlefield many times.

“I found a cannon ball over there near that fence post,” Perry tells me. He gestures toward the near distance and then proudly shows me a photo of the hefty find on his phone.

Liberty Gap battlefield from the air

Beyond a herd of cows in the far distance, a steep, heavily wooded hillside looms below a deep-blue sky.

“Best view of the valley from up there,” Chuck says.

I secretly hope that’s where 49th Ohio Sergeant Jonathan Rapp — a great great great grandfather of a young friend of mine — wrote this wonderful entry in his diary after fighting at the Gap:

Bullets -- one fired, one dropped -- unearthed
 at Liberty Gap.

“In the valleys of Liberty Gap, the great mountains all covered with green trees. They lift their proud head so near to the sky. The rich valleys just ready for harvest; the wheat which is in abundance just ready to reap; the cornfields so green and so fine, just ready to shoot forth into blossom, but now are all trodden down by the soldiers of liberty.”

While Chuck waves his magic wand over hallowed ground, I swap Civil War stories with Perry, an unforgettable character.

“Where’d you get that earring?” I ask, gesturing to a small silver loop in his left ear.

“Had that since 1966,” he says.

Then Perry recounts a dizzying array of relic hunting finds and a long-ago encounter with one of the finest people our country has produced. “I met Coretta Scott King,” he says of the wife of Martin Luther King, the slain civil rights leader. “I gave her a hug. It was like meeting Jesus.”

Before going our separate ways, Perry and I also embrace. Until next time, my new friend.