In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

235 Appendix:KennesawaftertheWar After fourteen days of confrontation along the Kennesaw Line, the two armies moved southward to continue their struggle for control of Atlanta. The presence of something like 150,000 men near the twin-peaked eminence had transformed the rural landscape. “The country all around was cut up with entrenchments and honeycombed with rifle pits,” recalled W. J. Worsham of the Nineteenth Tennessee. Vegetation in range of sharpshooters and artillerymen was devastated. Worsham described wooded stretches of ground that “looked as dreary and as desolate as if it had been swept by a tornado.”1 Another Confederate soldier who visited Kennesaw sometime after 1869 reported that the trees were riddled, torn, and splintered for a distance of four hundred yards in front of the position held by Cleburne’s division. Trees scarred by hundreds of bullets presented “the strangest and most grotesque appearance,” in his view. Trunks were split for twenty feet up the trunk by the impact of artillery rounds. The unnamed veteran found one tree with a hole drilled completely through the trunk which yet was growing even though a man could thrust his arm completely through the opening until his hand appeared on the other side.2 Civilian visitors were keenly interested in the historic heights of Kennesaw. A minister working for the U.S. Christian Commission walked up the mountain in early August 1864 and brought back “glowing acc’ts of the scenery & extended landscape” to his colleagues working among the Union soldiers. He also picked a “specimen of cactus” and brought it from the height. Two years later, Benson J. Lossing visited Kennesaw and reported that local residents had already sold more than 200,000 pounds of spent bullets which they had dug out of the earthwork or found lying about on the ground.3 Most Federal veterans seemed little interested in the battlefield of Kennesaw Mountain until the 1890s, when they began to visit the quiet woods near Marietta in large numbers. Theodore D. Neighbor of the Fifty-Second Ohio toured the battlefield in 1895 and 1897 and “found everything about as we had left it” more than thirty years before. The mine shaft was still open, but many older trees had withered and died from the effects of battle. The landscape sported a new, second growth of timber . All the head logs on the Union and Confederate earthworks had long since rotted away or had been taken by local farmers, but the timber used by the Rebels to revet the interior slope of their parapets remained intact, although it had rotted. “There 236 : appENdIx are young saplings six and eight inches through growing up through the works,” Neighbor reported a few years later.4 James T. Holmes of the Fifty-Second Ohio visited the field on May 21, 1897. There was still no road leading to the top of Big Kennesaw, and the last half mile of the walk to the summit was a heroic undertaking for a man of Holmes’s age. He found that by now the name Cheatham’s Hill had been applied to the low eminence where the angle in the Confederate line rested. Cheatham had passed away in 1886 and, as Holmes cleverly put it, “his name very appropriately sticks, as did his troops, to this hill.”5 The next day Holmes took a buggy tour of the battlefield with his wife, driven by Uncle Moses Bacon who ran a livery stable in Marietta. Bacon took the pair to the bivouac area of McCook’s brigade on the nights of June 25–26 and then to the staging area for the attack. When he asked Holmes if he recognized the place, the veteran replied , “I reckon I do Uncle Mose.” Holmes stepped out of the carriage and surveyed the scene. A public road ran just behind the staging area, which now was planted in cotton. Holmes walked a few paces toward the Confederate line until he could see across the branch valley. “The same sun was shining over field and wood and stream, and it was about the same hour of the morning. Cheatham hill had the same innocent , peaceful look it had on that other morning, thirty-three years ago.”6 Holmes moved toward the objective of McCook’s attack and found the trees that had once fringed the branch were gone, and the underbrush was now much lighter in growth than in 1864. “The little meadow is discernable, but somewhat effaced, so far as...

Share