Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park has quickly become one of my favorite places in the Southeast. About fifteen miles northwest of Atlanta, Kennesaw Mountain is a refuge of public land, green space, and hiking trails. At roughly 3,000 acres, the park has twenty-eight miles of hiking trails and, at its peak, rises almost 700 feet above the city of Atlanta. Accessing this greenspace is what drew me to the park at first; I wanted to hike its trails and spot its birds, since the mountain also serves as a key pit stop for migrating warblers and tanagers in spring and fall. The more I hiked there the more I became curious about what made this park significant. I figured if it could resist the tsunami of developmental forces radiating out from Atlanta, it must have a good reason.
Curious to learn more about the park’s story I poked my head into the visitor center and mosied through the small museum. Interpretive signs led me through the battle for Kennesaw Mountain, a key stop in Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign of 1864, the beginning of the end of the American Civil War. I’m not much of a Civil War buff, and I tend to avoid going to a museum to read signs, so my expectations were low. But when the ranger on duty started to lead a tour through the exhibits, I got sucked in.
He pointed out significant images, explaining who was who and the strategies of the battle. He noted artifacts on display, and at one point pulled out a recently discovered twelve-pound cannon ball to pass around. What struck me the most was a pair of pictures taken, one directly after the battle by an unknown photographer, and the other taken by the ranger from the same point, present day. The black-and-white photo from 1864 shows a log cabin surrounded by partially destroyed split-rail fencing, with Kennesaw Mountain in the background. In the foreground are mounds of dirt and fallen trees, protective cover for soldiers maneuvering through the field.
In contrast, the modern photo showed a typical Atlanta-suburban scene, taken just beyond the park boundaries: paved streets, a large vinyl-sided house, a manicured bermudagrass lawn. The foregrounds of these two scenes are unrecognizable, but the mountain is unchanged.
After the tour concluded I thanked the ranger and walked out from the visitor center to the battlefield. A well manicured field of grass stretched out before me, the same one I passed on my way to the visitor’s center, but it felt palpably different now somehow. The ground was level but I knew now that it had once been potholed with cannon ball blasts. The grass was green, fading to tan as it does during winter in the South; 160 years ago the ground would have been stained with blood. Cars raced by on the highway bordering the park, and they drove even faster on the interstate, I-75, just a half mile north, following the rail system that would have sent supplies down to Union troops at this very battle.
Leaving the field I turned and walked into the woods on a trail running along the base of the mountain. I noted the old white oaks and wondered whether or not lead bullets were still buried under their layers of bark and cambium. I wondered if more cannonballs lay undetonated, lurking under the leaves and a thin layer of soil. The more my thoughts reckoned with the events I had just learned about, the more I felt I was walking on a palimpsest—not to mention the layers of history stretching far back before the relatively recent civil war. (Apparently, there are no dinosaur bones hidden in the layers of Appalachian mountain soil because the mountains were formed a few hundred million years before the dinosaurs existed. Some timescales are not fathomable.)
I also spotted a Joro spider, nestled in a crevice of bark watching over a clutch of what appeared to be eggs. A new visitor to the scene, this east Asian species of spider was accidently transplanted to Georgia a few years ago and has proven itself to be an adept web builder. Without any natural enemies, Joros have been thriving and spreading across the southeast, adding a new layer to the palimpsest of the land.
As it turns out, history is everywhere, whether or not there’s a museum or guided tour to interpret it. I found it refreshing, though, to be in a space where a story of the past was told with such detail. That tour altered the way I saw the world around me. It helped me realize I was walking on more than just a trail through the woods—a trail that was made up, physically and metaphorically, of so much that had come before. In that respect, there is no such thing as just a trail; because all of it came from somewhere, and it all has a story.
If I think about it too much, I get overwhelmed, which doesn’t do anyone any good. But being aware of some of the history somewhere has made me a little more reverent of the history everywhere and a lot more curious about digging deeper.
Jon Gorter (‘17) graduated from Calvin with degrees in English and environmental studies and holds an MS in natural resources from the University of Michigan. He enjoys fly fishing, mushroom foraging, and waterfall scrambling near his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
