Lovejoy's Station: The Last Stand Below Atlanta

By August of eighteen sixty-four, William Sherman had been trying to take Atlanta for nearly four months. His armies had pushed the Confederates back from Dalton to the city's edge, fighting a dozen engagements along the way. Atlanta's defenses held. So Sherman changed his approach. He would strangle the city by destroying its rail supply lines.

The Macon and Western Railroad was the last open artery into Atlanta from the south. On August eighteenth, Sherman sent his cavalry commander, Judson Kilpatrick, on a raid to tear up the tracks. Kilpatrick struck south, burning a depot at Jonesborough on the nineteenth, then swung toward the small station at Lovejoy, today just off US Route Nineteen in Henry County.

On August twentieth, Kilpatrick's horsemen reached Lovejoy's Station and began tearing up track. But the Confederate infantry division of Patrick Cleburne was waiting. Cleburne, an Irish-born general considered by many the finest division commander in the Confederate Army of Tennessee, drove the Union cavalry back repeatedly. The raiders had wrecked only a short stretch of rail, not enough to shut the line, and Kilpatrick fought his way out.

Sherman, unimpressed, wrote that the raid had failed. He then launched his full army in a massive southward sweep that cut the Macon line with infantry at Jonesborough on August thirty-first and September first. Atlanta's fall followed two days later.

After the fall, the Confederate army fell back to Lovejoy's Station, and fighting there continued into the first days of September as both sides reconsidered their next moves. The small station thus bracketed the end of Atlanta: the cavalry raid that failed, and the camp where the Confederates gathered to figure out what came next.

Almost nothing marks the spot today. The ground around Lovejoy is suburban lawn and strip commercial development. But in the last two weeks of August eighteen sixty-four, it was one of the most consequential patches of red clay in Georgia.