Site Visit Saturday: Marietta Confederate Cemetery, Georgia

 

   A battle produced ghastly numbers of dead: 3,100 at Gettysburg; 2,843 at Second Manassas; 1,900 at Franklin. Bodies needed to be interred as quickly as possible, a task usually left to the victor that held the field. Sometimes the dead were buried where they fell, and at other times they were gathered and interred in trenches.

   The battle of Chickamauga was fought in September 1862. While it was a Confederate victory, almost 4,000 soldiers from both sides were killed. Confederate forces buried the vast majority after the battle was over. Once the conflict ended, the war-ravaged landscape was littered with more than 700,000 graves. The Federal government was quick to establish a program to disinter Federal soldiers from various battlefield and hospital sites and re-inter their dead in what became National cemeteries. (National cemeteries were established by an act of Congress on July 17, 1862.)

   Confederate dead were untouched by the hands of the government. Instead, Southern civilian organizations were formed for the purpose of finding and relocating the graves of fallen soldiers. Because of laws that prevented former Confederate soldiers from gathering, much of the work fell to women. A group of thirteen women met in July 1866 in Resaca, Georgia, and formed a “Ladies Memorial Association.” About this same time, Mary Green, instrumental in the formation of the Ladies Memorial Association, began working on a cemetery for Confederate soldiers killed and buried near her home in Resaca. When the project was finished in October 1866, over 450 soldiers had been reinterred.

   Resaca was just one small portion of the fighting in North Georgia during the war. Mary Green approached the Georgia Legislature for funding, which, despite the impoverished condition of the state government, agreed to help. They not only agreed to pay off what remained of the bill for re-interring Confederate dead from the Resaca battlefield, but also agreed to an additional $3,500 for a cemetery for the Confederate dead from the Chickamauga battlefield. A site was chosen in Marietta, Georgia. The site was adjacent to the Western and Atlantic Railroad, and was an already established Confederate cemetery, begun in 1863, next to the Marietta City Cemetery. There were soldiers buried here who had died in a train crash, and some who had died in area hospitals. Mrs. Jane Porter Glover of Marietta donated the property for the cemetery expansion.

   There were three different groupings in which the work was carried out. The first took place in July and August 1867, when fourteen graves were removed. Beginning in October 1867, 151 more soldiers were removed from the Chickamauga battlefield. In 1869, a third group of removals began, and eventually, 615 Confederate soldiers killed at Chickamauga were reburied at the Marietta Confederate Cemetery. The group then began searching for burials in and around Ringgold, Kolb’s Farm, Tunnel Hill, and parts of the Atlanta Campaign.

   Besides holding the remains of graves of Confederate soldiers who died during the war, the Marietta Confederate Cemetery was also the burial location for some of the men who died in the old Confederate soldier’s home in Atlanta. The Marietta Confederate Cemetery is one of the largest in the South, probably behind Hollywood Cemetery (18,000 graves) and Oakwood Cemetery (17,000 graves), both in Richmond, and Blandford Church Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, with 30,000 Confederate graves. At the Marietta Confederate Cemetery, there are markers for some of the soldiers, markers for various states represented in the cemetery, and a statue honoring Mary Green.

   I last visited this site in May 2008.