- Joined
- Feb 23, 2013
- Location
- East Texas
Just in time for Memorial Day, here are photos of one of the earliest cemeteries set aside expressly for Confederate dead. The above overview shows the Tennessee section with the several narkers and monuments in the background. According to the cemetery map and brochure,
More than 3,000 soldiers, from every Confederate state and Kentucky, now lie in the Marietta Confederate Cemetery. The cemetery was established in September, 1863, when Mrs. Jane Porter Glover donated the quiet corner of her Bushy Park Plantation to accomodate the burial of approximately 20 Confederate soldiers who perished in a train wreck just north of Marietta. A few new graves were added to the cemetery during the next several months, but major expansions did not occur until the war reached nearby Kennesaw Mountain on july 27, 1864.
The greatest expansion of the cemetery took place when the guns at last fell silent. In 1866, the Georgia Legislature appropriated $3,500 to collect the remains of Confederate soldiers who fell elsewhere in Georgia and return them to Marietta for reburial. The recovery effort was spearheaded by Catherine Winn of the Ladies' Aid Society and Mary Green of the Georgia Memorial Association, who organized groups of women to search for soldiers who were killed on the battlefields at Ringgold, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, Kolb Farm, and the points north of the Chattahoochie River. These dedicated women helped bring the remains of hundreds of Confederate soldiers to rest with their comrades in Marietta...
In 1907, Mrs. Glover deeded the cemetery to the Ladies' Memorial Association. The Association then turned the property over to the state in 1908, the same year the Kennesaw Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated the tall marble monument in the center of the cemetery to "Our Confederate Dead."
After the Spanish-American War, this cemetery became the first place in the South where the Confederate flag was allowed to fly.
The hillside became the focal point of the city's Confederate Memorial Day observance in April.
As the years passed and the original wooden markers weathered away, the names of soldiers killed in action and buried here were lost. In 1902, caretakers replaced the deteriorated original wooden markers with the plain marble markers of the type you see today.
TO BE CONTINUED...