Don Troiani is a painter of carefully researched American military scenes who also collects historical artifacts. “If you’re a collector,” he told me recently, “you have to be fully prepared for your end, because all of a sudden people you’ve never heard of will be at the door.” We were talking about Bill Erquitt, who died a few years ago. Erquitt collected many things, but what brought him some acclaim and a fair degree of notoriety were Civil War relics, which filled his home in southwest Atlanta. “He was divorced, so there was stuff everywhere,” Troiani said. “Confederate belt buckles, swords, guns, and photography of Confederate soldiers. Like, five Confederate battle flags.”
Battle flags are particularly sought after by collectors. They “literally marked the battle lines, where soldiers from the North and South died by the tens of thousands,” Robert K. Wittman, who founded the F.B.I.’s art-crime team, writes in “Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures.” A particularly valuable flag was stolen in the nineteen-eighties from the Atlanta Historical Society—now the Atlanta History Center—where Erquitt worked as a curator. It had been handsewn in New Orleans in 1862; it was seized by a Union soldier during the occupation of Atlanta and carried on the Northern Army’s march to the sea. It ended up in a New Hampshire antique store, where it was bought, in 1938, by a couple from Georgia. “A Confederate Flag, Stolen in Atlanta During War Between the States, Comes Home,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The couple donated it to the historical society. Decades later, Erquitt noted its disappearance in a letter to a historian. But the society, wishing to avoid embarrassment, never reported it missing.
Erquitt resigned from the job in 1992. Several months later, he starred in a three-part investigative series on local television, “The Lost Treasures of Atlanta,” which was billed as “one whistle-blower’s ten-year search down a disappearing paper trail.” In the series, Erquitt describes security at the society as “pitiful” and alleges a coverup of multiple thefts. “The trustees of our history are plunderers of the past,” he says, listing half a dozen missing relics. Society officials furnished explanations for every item but the flag. “To Bill Erquitt, it’s all still a mystery,” the host of the series says.
So it came as a surprise when the flag finally turned up, a few months after Erquitt’s death. “Lord knows I’d had my eyes open for it for a long time,” Gordon Jones, a senior military historian at the Atlanta History Center, told me. An artifact dealer from Gettsyburg had brought the flag to a relic show in Dalton, and someone spotted it there. The dealer had purchased the flag for thirty-six thousand dollars; it was probably worth four times that much, but neither he nor the seller knew anything about the flag’s provenance. It had been found, not long before, inside a glass cabinet hidden behind a mess of Civil War memorabilia in Bill Erquitt’s basement. The person who’d stolen it, all those years ago, was almost certainly Erquitt himself.
Depending on where you live, and whether there’s much public land nearby, you may have seen a man—usually a man, typically by himself—roaming over a stretch of ground, with a long pole affixed to a coil, listening for little pings indicating the presence of metal underground. In some places, this is called detectorism, but in the South it’s called relic hunting, and the most popular relics are those connected to the Civil War. Although metal detecting reportedly caught on among a new crowd during the pandemic, relic enthusiasts are mostly older folks, these days; a twenty-nine-year-old dealer of historic firearms told me that he’s the youngest person in the industry, and I didn’t find reason to doubt him. Lori Cosgrove, who used to run a relic shop in Stone Mountain, told me that the only youngsters she saw at relic shows were kin to the older diggers.
Erquitt told friends that he’d been introduced to the hobby in the late fifties or early sixties, when he was about twelve years old. He was in the car with his parents, he said, when he saw a man on the roadside with a metal detector. “He got his mother to stop and see what this guy was doing,” Perry Bennett, an amateur historian who also maintains a collection of militaria, told me. “The guy said, ‘I’m looking for artillery shells from the Civil War.’ And his name was Beverly DuBose, Jr.—the Beverly DuBose, Jr.”
DuBose, Jr., was an insurance executive from a well-to-do Atlanta family. He also seems to have been among the very first people to hunt for relics with a metal detector. A veteran of the Second World War, he began using a military-surplus landmine-locating device, strapped on his back, as early as 1946. Later, he founded the Civil War Round Table of Atlanta and served as president of the Atlanta Historical Society.
Erquitt began digging for relics near his parents’ house. After he finished high school, he joined the Marines and was sent to Vietnam. When he returned home, he got married, had two kids, and moved into his parents’ basement. His father worked as a plumber and electrician, and Erquitt did electrical work, too, but perhaps not very much of it. “Some of these hunters, they wake up and do a little menial work so they can dig all afternoon,” Cosgrove, the former relic-shop owner, told me. “That was Bill.”
Erquitt, who was six feet tall and nearly three hundred pounds, resembled “one of those TV wrestlers,” Cosgrove said. He had a scar on his stomach, which he said he’d got from a bayonet in Vietnam; he also said he’d suffered psychological trauma from a plane crash during the war. His primary hunting grounds were in what is now the Cascade Springs Nature Preserve, in southwest Atlanta. The Battle of Utoy Creek was fought there, in 1864. More than a thousand soldiers, mostly on the Union side, were killed or wounded. After it was over, and the North had lost, William Tecumseh Sherman proposed that the U.S. Army “make the inside of Atlanta too hot to be endured.” Nearly half the city was destroyed.
“I look on this whole area out here as my family tree,” Erquitt told a reporter for the Journal-Constitution, in the late seventies, when the paper published a long piece about Erquitt and the rise of relic hunting. The hobby caught on as commercial metal detectors became available, but it earned a mixed reputation. On one hand, relic hunters are passionate about the past, and some document it with care. Dubose, Jr., eventually donated thousands of his best relics to the Atlanta Historical Society. The relic hunter Tom Dickey—a pal of Erquitt’s, and the brother of the novelist James Dickey—sold much of his massive collection to the center as well. As a result, according to Scott Stephenson, the president of the Museum of the American Revolution, in Philadelphia, the Atlanta History Center has “the best institutional collection from the American Civil War anywhere. I put them up against the Smithsonian,” Stephenson added.
On the other hand, relic hunters don’t always dig carefully, or with permission. They often keep what they find. “They want to hold history in their hands,” Cosgrove said. Some archeologists compare them to looters. A relic hunter whom I’ll call Wilbur told me that Erquitt was especially possessive. Wilbur met Erquitt after digging at Cascade, several years ago. “He thought anything that came out of Cascade was stolen from him,” another friend and fellow-digger told me, recalling Erquitt’s delight when the friend had, in Erquitt’s words, “found me a breastplate.” Perry Bennett called this “treasure-hunter’s syndrome,” the conviction that “all of this is my territory, and I’m not sharing.” Bennett eventually tried to broker a peace between Wilbur and Erquitt. “We did this, like, Yalta-esque, map-of-Europe carving up of who could hunt where in southwest Atlanta,” Wilbur recalled. “Which I immediately broke.”
Wilbur, who spoke to me while digging a stranger’s yard—without permission, just before sod went in—doesn’t believe there are many rules for relic hunting, a pastime he described as “compulsive, like archeological scratch-off tickets.” Erquitt taught him that the best time to hunt for relics on a stranger’s property is Super Bowl Sunday, Wilbur said. (“Everyone is at their TV, so I can be digging the shit out of their yard,” he added.) Wilbur said that he’d tried running a two-man yard crew, so he could dig while the other guy was mowing the lawn. He mentioned a local cemetery where, at one time, if you gave the sexton a bottle of liquor, “he’d let you hunt all night.”
Erquitt was “the don of this field,” according to Wilbur, and also a “total Shakespearean kind of villain,” a description he intended as a compliment. Erquitt had managed to combine his shadier practices with a place in the more respectable corners of regional history. He “fooled a lot of people,” Wilbur said. “He thought he was untouchable.”
Earlier this year, I went to see Beverly DuBose III in the mansion that he built, beside a Confederate trench, high above the Chattahoochee River, in a forested corner of north Atlanta. Gordon Jones joined us there. “I still have the largest private collection of Civil War artifacts anywhere,” DuBose III told me, as we toured the museum-like home. Dubose III, who also collects Chinese armorial porcelain and fine copper vessels, has a speaking voice that sounds about an octave below the actor Sam Elliott’s. He showed me everything from rare muskets and swords to an advertisement for a Civil War-era condom.
After his father decided to donate relics to the historical society, DuBose III helped negotiate the gift. Then he got a phone call from Erquitt. “He wanted to be curator of the collection,” DuBose said. He got the job, and soon traded his digger duds—torn jeans and T-shirts—for a suit. Erquitt helped the DuBoses install an early Civil War exhibit, and gave occasional talks. The society, which began, in the nineteen-twenties, as a sort of club for affluent Atlanta men passionate about their families’ histories, started to become more professional. It changed its name to the Atlanta History Center in 1990. Jones, a former Civil War reënactor who not only has a bushy beard but a Ph.D., came aboard the following year, boosting the center’s academic credentials. But he saw right away that “there was something terribly dysfunctional” going on, he told me. He soon learned that Erquitt and DuBose III, who was on the center’s board and would later become its president, were not speaking. Erquitt had been demoted to a library role.
A handful of valuable items that belonged to the center had gone missing from DuBose’s home, where they were being stored, and DuBose was convinced that Erquitt had taken them. The center took Erquitt to court but was unable to prove its case. There were other forms of pilfering, too, apparently. Erquitt had published articles in a magazine for collectors and other enthusiasts called North South Trader’s Civil War, and one of them, about Utoy Creek, had been copied verbatim from a text at the history center, I was told. When I asked the magazine’s longtime editor about this, she told me that if you search Erquitt’s name on its Web site, you won’t find any of his articles, because she deleted them all.
DuBose, Jones, and I retired to a wood-panelled study, where DuBose offered us drinks. Then he began to share his thoughts on the war. “The South would’ve voluntarily ended slavery within a few years,” he said. His wife, who had just walked in, suggested that most slaves had likely been treated well, since, adjusting for inflation, “they cost as much as sports cars, and it doesn’t make sense to damage your car.” Moments later, Jones nudged me toward the door, and I said good night.
There is, especially but not exclusively in the South, a keener interest in the Confederacy among collectors and relic hunters—along with, often, a wish to see the men who fought on that side as heroic, and a tendency not to look too hard or too carefully at what they were fighting for. Confederate items fetch better prices than Union ones, partly because they’re less plentiful, Scott Stephenson, the Philadelphia historian, told me. (Sherman had something to do with that.) “But there’s also the whole Lost Cause idea,” Stephenson said, “which excites certain collectors.” The myth of the Lost Cause, a stubborn form of pseudo-historical revisionism which holds that the war wasn’t really about slavery—and that slavery wasn’t actually as horrific as people say—regards the Civil War as an attack on an essentially noble Southern way of life. (North South Trader’s Civil War, on its Web site, still refers to the conflict as “the war between the states.”)
“In all our time together, I don’t know that we ever talked about slavery,” Mike Almond, a relic-hunting pal of Erquitt’s, said. “But,” Almond added, “he was sympathetic to the Southern cause.” Bennett told me that he and Erquitt both attended meetings of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Given that their ancestors fought for the South, their Confederate sympathies made sense, he said. I noted that some of my ancestors also fought for that side, but that I found it important to maintain a critical perspective. He warned me not to “fall into that woke trap.”
One day in 1992, at the history center, Jones recalled, Erquitt said, “I’m in some trouble.” He didn’t explain any further, Jones told me, and he resigned the next day. Later, after “The Lost Treasures of Atlanta” had aired, Erquitt served briefly as president of the Civil War Round Table of Atlanta, a group that exists to foster and promote study of the war. But his leadership wasn’t welcomed by everyone—DuBose III quit the group in protest. Eventually, Erquitt moved to Tulsa, where he ran an antique shop called Granny’s Memories for a while. He came back to Atlanta in the early two-thousands and returned to his old hunting grounds, but he had lost his foothold in the more respectable corners of his world. In 2008, he applied to join the American Legion. Bennett, a career Army officer who retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel, examined his records. Erquitt, he said, was in Vietnam for a single day. The scar on his stomach was caused by the removal of a cyst.
In June, 2020, Erquitt was relic hunting in a yard across the street from his house when he had a heart attack and collapsed. He called Bennett, who called 911, and Erquitt was rushed to a hospital. He died later that day. In the weeks that followed, a few people showed up at his house at odd hours, and for dubious reasons, his daughter told me. She found Wilbur trying to get into her father’s car, she said, and suspected he was looking for the garage-door clicker so that he could break into the house through the garage; he told her he was looking for an old coin of his. (Wilbur disputed this version of events.) Bennett came by around midnight once, a neighbor told me. Bennett insists that he was just looking after his friend’s property.
Neither of Erquitt’s children ever took much interest in their father’s relics. Now they were mourning their dad and also trying to unload a dusty and bewildering estate. It’s hard to estimate its value, since so few people saw the entire collection, but an appraiser told me that it might have been worth a few million dollars. “Lots of friends showed up to ‘help’ clear it out,” a neighbor, Andy Balk, said. By the time the dealer from Gettysburg arrived, the house had been “ransacked,” the dealer told me. He said he paid a fair price for a battle flag of unknown provenance that would need to be restored.
“Daddy said two things were worth a lot of money: one of the flags and a uniform,” Erquitt’s daughter told me. Thirty-six thousand dollars seemed like a lot to her. Sheffield Hale, the president and C.E.O. of the Atlanta History Center, told me that the institution never stopped looking for the flag: “We’re a history center and we have a long memory. People like Gordon and Bo—they keep an ear to the ground. We’re relentless in our pursuit of missing things.” After the flag was identified, the dealer handed it over to the history center, and Erquitt’s daughter returned his money.
Andy Balk eventually bought his former neighbor’s home. A retired electrician in his late sixties, he’s still trying to make sense of the man he knew. Erquitt said that he collected large rocks from riverbeds because they had been used by an extinct race of giant humans, Balk recalled. “He quoted the Bible about prehistoric life,” Balk said, while showing me around the home. “He said there was a civilization before us and these were their hand tools.” Balk gave the rocks to a friend, who put them in his garden. I flipped through some LPs in the living room, the last few records left from Erquitt’s collection. “He never listened to music,” Balk said. “He just liked having the records.” Erquitt’s mother, who was religious, hadn’t allowed them.
Among the things Erquitt left behind were a set of journals. In one entry, he wrote, “I love the items on my shelves and their memories and secret thoughts but even with all my love these things don’t love back. They are manmade objects that happened to be involved with my life . . . traumatic, eventful, pleasant or not the secret emotion lingers until called upon.” The entry concludes, “These things fill a ‘gap’ in my life.”
Later, I spoke with a senior member of the F.B.I.’s art-crime team. People who steal military artifacts tend to have different motivations than those who steal valuable paintings, he said—they usually have “a real love interest for this part of history,” along with “an unhealthy connection to the physical objects that remain.” He described it as a hoarder’s mentality: “People can take objects like this and go underground with them for a generation.” Sheffield Hale told me about a man he knew named Robert (Skeet) Willingham, who was the librarian in charge of rare books at the University of Georgia. In 1988, Willingham was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for stealing nearly a third of the collection, some of which was found in his home. “If someone on the inside wants to steal something,” Hale said, “it’s very hard to prevent them.”
In Erquitt’s attic, Balk found bicycles, desks, and an I.D. that belonged to a neighbor’s mother. “I found a lot of my stuff here, too, including copies of my own photos,” he said. “If Bill could find something around your house, he’d take it.” Erquitt once tried to recruit Balk to join him on a nocturnal mission to dig up a cannon, but Balk declined. Still, they got along. They were both divorcés with adult kids and unusual hobbies. Balk collects reptiles; he keeps a few two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Aldabra tortoises in his back yard. (One recently escaped.) Bill wasn’t into reptiles, Balk said, but he’d keep an eye on the tortoises when Balk was out of town.
Erquitt’s daughter said that, whatever her father’s flaws may have been, he also did a lot of good. “He knew a lot and mentored a lot of people,” she said. It bothered her that some of his friends pointed to his alleged misdeeds but not their own. “This whole Civil War group, all they did was steal from each other,” she said.
Balk recorded a video of Erquitt in his final years. “I knew Bill was in bad shape and he had so much history to share,” Balk told me. In the footage, Erquitt describes working at Granny’s Memories. The store had that name, Erquitt says, “because that’s what lured the money out of their pocket and into my pocket—their warm-and-fuzzies.” He grins. “As I get older, the crappy old memories go away, most of them. But the good memories shine out when I see these various things.” He stares at something out of view. “Every one of them,” he says, “has a story to tell.” ♦
