The Death of a Relic Hunter

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.”