SALISBURY — Clint Johnson, a Civil War writer from Ashe County with more than a dozen books published on the war, will speak to the Rowan Rifles Camp No. 405 Sons of Confederate Veterans at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday in the Stanback Room of the Rowan County Public Library.
The public is invited.
Johnson will show a 45-minute slide show based on his book “Touring the Carolinas’ Civil War Sites,” which he updated last year. The book covers 21 point-to-point driving tours in both Carolinas and includes information on how to find battlefields, historic houses and sites, and the graves of people who played major roles in the war. It covers both well-known and little-known historic sites in the Carolinas.
Johnson is a native Southerner whose Scots-Irish and Welsh ancestors first settled in North Carolina in the 1730s and 1760s. He is a native of Fish Branch, Fla., and graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in journalism.
Fascinated with the War for Southern Independence since the fourth grade, Johnson has written nine books on the war, one on the South, and one on the American Revolution. One of his favorite projects was helping Clarence “Big House” Gaines, one of the nation’s best basketball coaches, write his autobiography.
Johnson has also written two corporate biographies and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on business, history and travel. He and his wife live in the mountains of North Carolina near where the Overmountain Men gathered to go fight the Tories at Kings Mountain in the American Revolution.