Tony Gonzalez

tgonzalez@tennessean.com

The little leather boot sat on a shelf for 90 years. A family heirloom, mostly just gathering dust.

But when it showed up in a room filled with historical archivists, well, the boot could still turn heads.

Myers Brown remembers the moment as the crowd gathered around it.

"This guy walks in and he's got it in this little box," said Brown, a researcher with the Tennessee State Library and Archives who specializes in the Civil War.

"It's a Yankee shoe. I knew immediately that it was legitimate."

But not just any Civil War-era shoe. A customized half of a shoe. Something that looks like it could fit a child's foot.

Of course, looks can deceive. The true story was even better.

"He said, 'Well, the family story is that my ancestor got half his foot shot off in the Battle of Franklin,' " Brown recalled.

It's the kind of remarkable story — proved by records — that came to light because of an unusual Tennessee project.

Instead of just preserving Civil War artifacts, the state library decided in 2010 to search for as many new ones as possible. The "Looking Back" project has called on descendants and relic hunters to bring forth their holdings at events in more than 70 counties.

No state has been so ambitious. The payoff: almost 4,000 never-before-seen artifacts newly photographed, documented and viewable online for other researchers and curiosity seekers.

"This stuff is coming from ordinary Tennesseans, most of it descended from their families. Or they metal detected it," said Wayne Moore, assistant state archivist. "This is material that has been in cedar chests and attics. It's new. A lot of it has never been seen outside the family."

It's a win-win for the state and families, Moore said. While the state got a new virtual repository, families got to show off their items and learn to preserve them.

Moore also has taken the project across the country to show other states how to duplicate it. But the resonance in Tennessee has been intensely personal for those who took part. State historians have helped many families learn about ancestors and connect to the past.

For Shawn Henry, the Nashville attorney who owns the half-boot, the encounter was just one milestone in what has become a bigger family history project.

The more he learns about the man who wore it, the more he wants to know.

Survival story

As a child, Henry, now 49, often looked at the boot up on a shelf at his grandmother's house.

"We didn't know anything," he said. "It was an oddity — a deformed boot for a deformed foot."

All that Henry had was the name of the great-great-grandfather who wore it: David M. Dotson.

That changed just before Christmas in 2009. A voicemail from an uncle set Henry on the hunt for more details. He hoped to share something new at a family gathering.

About five hours into his research at the state archives, following a line of tidbits through several types of records, he made a key finding in Dotson's request for a military pension.

"I was shot through the right foot near to my toes," reads the soldier's script writing, "in the line of duty during a charge."

"I just got goosebumps," Henry said. "For the first time, I see in his own handwriting that he was shot in the foot."

The next surprise: It happened at the Battle of Franklin, "right here in my backyard," and where re-enactors this weekend are commemorating the battle 150 years ago on Nov. 30.

A doctor amputated part of Dotson's foot one week later, leaving him in hospitals in Nashville and then Louisville, Ky., for the rest of the war. By 1903, records recount ongoing pain and the difficulties he had working on his 200-acre farm in Red Hill in East Tennessee.

For the last 60 years of his life, Dotson wore an assortment of customized shoes. But the first one — his wartime boot — was his lasting souvenir.

"It's a story of him surviving something that he should not have survived," Henry said.

The soldier lived to age 82 and had eight children, a lineage that leads to Henry and now to his own daughter. He photographed the girl recently next to a monument they visited at the Battle of Chickamauga National Military Park.

One stone stands at the precise place where his ancestor fought and survived. Half the men in Dotson's 37th Tennessee Infantry regiment were not so lucky, dying there in a close-range battle against cannons in the woods.

"It just boggles the mind: How do you survive that?" Henry said.

All kinds of pictures come to mind when Henry follows his ancestor's pained footsteps. And the more he learns, the more he shares each year at family gatherings.

"I take the boot, I tell the story, and I update the story," Henry said. "There's young kids, and I want them to hear the story."

Reach Tony Gonzalez at 615-259-8089 and on Twitter @tgonzalez.

Battles of Franklin and Nashville

• On Nov. 30, 1864, the Confederate Army of Tennessee with 30,000 men — many from Middle Tennessee — assaulted fortified Union positions in Franklin. The battle was a costly loss for the South, with more than 6,000 casualties. Six Confederate generals died in the battle.

• Despite those heavy losses, Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood led his army north toward Nashville. On the morning of Dec. 15, Union Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas' army attacked. The battle extended into Dec. 16, and Union forces forced Hood and his army to retreat.

• For the next 10 days, Union forces pursued Hood's battered Army of Tennessee and the general eventually resigned.

• The Battle of Nashville marked the last large-scale fighting of the Civil War in the western theater.