Marietta: Railroad Town, Resort, Battlefield

Marietta, the seat of Cobb County, is one of those Georgia towns that has lived several completely different lives in the same location. It was chartered in eighteen thirty-four, likely named for Mary Cobb, wife of the prominent jurist and senator Thomas Cobb for whom the county itself is named. In its early decades Marietta was a genuine resort. The Western and Atlantic Railroad arrived in the eighteen forties, and the town's elevation above the Georgia piedmont, combined with its hotels and a sanitarium, made it a fashionable retreat for coastal planters and their families escaping the summer heat and malaria of the lowcountry.

The war changed everything. Marietta sat squarely on the Western and Atlantic line, the critical rail artery connecting Atlanta to Chattanooga and the Confederate heartland. It was here in the spring of eighteen sixty-two that James Andrews assembled his Union raiders before the Great Locomotive Chase began a few miles north at Big Shanty. By eighteen sixty-four the town had become a vast Confederate hospital complex, receiving the wounded from the battles grinding down the mountain ridges to the north and west.

On July third, eighteen sixty-four, Sherman's Union armies occupied Marietta. The town square with its antebellum courthouse became a Union headquarters. When Sherman began his March to the Sea that November, departing troops set fire to much of the town, as they had already burned the countryside for miles around. The Marietta Confederate Cemetery, established during the war when the hospitals were overwhelmed, holds the remains of roughly three thousand Confederate soldiers.

The Marietta of today is the largest city in Cobb County, a suburb absorbed into the broader Atlanta metro but fiercely proud of its antebellum and Civil War heritage. Its historic town square, much of it rebuilt after the war's burning, remains the heart of the city.