Resaca, Georgia

Resaca is a small Gordon County town whose name echoes a battle fought fifteen hundred miles away. Confederate soldiers who had fought at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma in the Mexican-American War in eighteen forty-six settled here and gave the place that name. The Georgia Resaca then became a battlefield itself.

In May of eighteen sixty-four, Union General William Sherman's forces and Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army clashed here over two days in some of the first heavy fighting of the Atlanta Campaign. Between five and seven thousand men were killed, wounded, or captured at Resaca before Johnston withdrew southward. The site today includes the Confederate Cemetery at Resaca, one of the only Confederate cemeteries established by a woman, Mary Green, who began burying the dead in her garden shortly after the battle.