"Garden of Heroes"
— Atlanta Campaign Heritage Trail —
This cemetery was
established on property once
owned by the First Baptist
Church of Marietta.
Following the church's move,
John H. Glover, Marietta's
first mayor, bought this
parcel. His wife, Jane Porter
Glover, permitted this quiet
corner of their 3,000-acre
Bushy Park Plantation to accommodate the burial
of approximately 20 Confederate
soldiers of the 50th Tennessee Infantry
Regiment who perished in a train wreck
north of Marietta on September 13,
1863. New graves were added
following the Battle of Chickamauga
on September 19 and 20, 1863. Major
expansions occurred after the war's
fighting reached nearby Kennesaw
Mountain on June 27, 1864.
The greatest expansion of the
cemetery took place after the war. In
1866, the Georgia Legislature
appropriated $3,500 to collect the
remains of Confederate soldiers who
fell elsewhere and bring them to
Marietta for reburial. Catherine Winn
of the Ladies' Aid Society and Mary Green of the
Georgia Memorial Association spearheaded the
recovery effort. They organized groups of women
to search for soldiers killed on the battlefields at
Chickamauga, Ringgold, Kennesaw Mountain,
Kolb Farm and other points north of the
Chattahoochee River.
As the original wooden grave markers
weathered away, the names of soldiers buried here
were lost. In 1902, caretakers
replaced the wooden
markers with plain marble markers. The Ladies'
Memorial Association turned the property over to
the State of Georgia in 1908. That same year the
Kennesaw Chapter of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy dedicated the tall marble veterans'
monument
"To Our Confederate Dead." Former
Confederate Brigadier General Clement A. Evans
referred to the cemetery as
"a rare garden of heroes"
when he helped dedicate the monument.
In 1910, an act of
Congress returned Marietta's
"Little Cannon" to the
cemetery from an arsenal
in Watervilet, New York.
Captured near Savannah
in 1864, its , 6-pounder
barrel had originally
been cast before the war
for the Georgia Military
Institute's use. The barrels
Latin inscription,
"Victrix fortunae Sapientia,"
translates to
"Wisdom, the Victor over Fortune."
Also in 1910, fifteen identical
markers were placed among the
cemetery's headstones, One
marker was placed for each of the
eleven Confederate states, plus
one for Kentucky, a single one for
Maryland and Missouri, one for
the Confederate Soldiers Home
section, and one for the Hospital
section. More than 3,000
Confederate soldiers now lie in
the cemetery.
The Confederate Soldiers
Home section includes the grave
of Bill Yopp, an African-
American drummer for the 14th
Georgia Infantry
Regiment.
Born into slavery near Dublin,
Georgia, Bill was the personal
servant of Thomas Yopp. When Thomas joined
the Confederate army, he took Bill with him.
Bill performed various tasks for the soldiers,
always charging ten cents. He gained the
nickname
"Ten Cent Bill."
In his later years, Bill, who
took the last name of his
former master, re-joined
Thomas Yopp at the
Confederate Soldiers Home.
Bill Yopp was made a member
of the United Confederate
Veterans before dying in 1936.
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