Lloyd Morris stood tall on the shaded incline Tuesday morning, gazing over a grassy field, thinking about breakfast.

Not his — the breakfast Union soldiers cooked down below on a summer day like this one 144 years ago.

Vino Wong/vwong@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Pam Barrott, 52, an avid hiker from Marietta, travels up a trail at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. More than 1.4 million visits are made to the park's 2,923 acres a year. The park, which welcomes bird-watchers, horseback riders and hikers, does not allow picnics, alcohol or soccer playing.

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Morris imagines he's a Rebel soldier hunkering down in one of the long trenches on what is now called Cheatham Hill, named for the Tennessee-born general whose troops defended it. The Union soldiers are so near he can hear the low rumble of their voices and smell their bacon cooking. He knows they are preparing to attack.

He considers what it would have been like to be a kid from Ohio or Illinois, rushing up a hill, far from home, into a fusillade of gunfire.

As chief ranger of Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, Morris's job is to protect these hallowed 2,923 acres. He has come to appreciate their history.

More than 5,000 soldiers died here from June 19 through July 2, 1864. Most of them were Union troops. But Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman managed to advance to Atlanta and march to Savannah and the sea.

Today this site, famous for war, is at peace. The tweets, chirps and thrrrrps of birds trill from its shady canopy.

Anna Bintliff, 2, saw a butterfly here, deep blue and black.

"It's gone," she said, when it fluttered away.

Pam Barott, 52, brought her poles and straw hat to hike the sun-dappled trails, as she does every day. She calls it a "pristine place."

Judy Davis, 57, of Sebring, Fla., came to feel a family connection with Private Alexander Peterson of Illinois, a Union soldier who charged up Cheatham Hill.

"He was my great-great-great uncle," she said. Then, turning to her husband, Benjamin, she asked, "Is that enough greats?"

The Davises planned to go on to visit other sites where Peterson fought: Chickamauga, on the Georgia-Tennessee line; Missionary Ridge, east of Chattanooga; and, Stones River, also known as Murfreesboro, in Middle Tennessee, where Peterson was shot in the forehead. Despite his battle experience, he returned to Illinois and lived to be an old man.

Morris is cognizant of these visitors' needs and those of all the people who make more than 1.4 million visits a year — the bird-watchers, the horseback riders, the cross-country trainers — but there are limits to what the National Park Service will allow. No alcohol. No picnics. No soccer fields.

"We have to educate people on a regular basis that this is not a recreational site," he said. "It's a national battlefield site. People died here. This place is to be remembered for the sacrifices all those Americans made."

He emphasizes "all" and "Americans."

Louisiana native Morris, 49, started work for the Park Service in 1979 as part of an effort to recruit African-American and female rangers. He's worked at Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis — officially the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial — and the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area and Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in metro Atlanta.

From his experience, he's gained insight about the battles that are over and those that aren't.

Looking over Kennesaw, he visualizes all of the young soldiers from all of his country's wars right up to today. He thinks — of all things — of a T-shirt he once saw.

He said its simple message seems to sum up all that he's seen: Freedom, it said, isn't free.