Historian catalogs Georgia’s Civil War markers

The job is simple, repetitive, fascinating: Get in the car. Drive. Find a Civil War historical marker. Note its condition, location, etc.

Return to car. Repeat the process 900-plus times.

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Mark Davis/mdavis@ajc.com

Historian Will Hanley adds a sign in Midtown to his documentation of historic markers throughout Georgia.

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That’s OK with Will Hanley. With rental car, computer and maps, the 28-year-old Savannah resident is compiling an inventory of Civil War markers across Georgia. Working for the Georgia Historical Society, Hanley is finding signs on roadsides and in state parks, in the blanket-flat reaches of southeast Georgia and the rumpled folds of the state’s northwest region. It’s part of the state’s plan to observe the 150th anniversary of the 1861-1865 war.

Hanley began his travels in late August, blogging as he went. Compiling the inventory should take about 11 months. The society is making the count with a grant for $132,307 from the state Department of Economic Development. When complete, the inventory will help the organization plan a series of historical driving trails it wants completed by 2011, the first year of the sesquicentennial.

“You get to see a lot of interesting things,” said Hanley, who makes forays every other week. Each outing, which comprises three nights and four days, racks up about 800 miles on a series of rental cars. Hanley figures he’s driven about 5,000 miles so far, cataloging troop movements, battles and other moments in the war.

Hanley, who is working on a master’s degree in historic preservation at UGA, uses maps that haven’t been revised in three decades. They are the property of the state Department of Natural Resources, which took over the state’s historic-marker program in 1974. Those documents, he said, aren’t always complete, not always accurate. It makes for interesting trips.

He has stopped pedestrians in small downtowns, asking if they’ve seen a green, aluminum sign that marks an army’s passage 150 years earlier. He has wandered roadways that thread sedged tracts where the only sound was his passing car.

He has stood in Jefferson County at three tall chimneys, the worn reminders of Old Town, a plantation lost to Sherman’s army as it advanced to the sea. Like the effigy in “Ozymandias,” Shelley’s poem about fleeting glory, they stand guard over the past. It is one of his favorite markers.

He has walked in the dark in Taliaferro County, nearly stumbling on what he thinks was a dog-fighting ring. “I got out of there fast,” he said.

He’s moved pretty quickly when he’s come upon Georgians that hiss and slither, too. “I have seen some snakes, yeah,” he said.

About 2,000 state-owned historical markers dot the state, said Judd Smith, resident manager of DNR’s Parks and Historic Sites division. Signs near the Etowah River explain the lives of mound-builders who vanished centuries ago. Those near Savannah extol the founding of the colony of Georgia. Markers closer to Atlanta are reminders of Georgia’s role in World War II.

Nearly half deal with the Civil War, said Smith. More than 400 are concentrated in the metro area.

“We know where they are,” said Smith, who paused. “We know where they’re supposed to be.”

But signs, like time, move on. Cars knock them over. Road crews remove them to make way for highway projects. Some, inexplicably, wind up in basements or living rooms. “A lot of times,” he said, “they just disappear.”

The state this year allocated $50,000 to maintain and replace the signs. Replacing one, said Smith, costs about $3,000.

Hanley estimates about 10 percent of the state’s signs are damaged, or gone.

The marker program dates to the 1950s, and the creation of the Georgia Historical Commission, which devoted its efforts to erecting Civil War signs in time for the war’s 1961 centennial. The commission disbanded and DNR took over the state markers’ maintenance.

The Civil War markers vary, said Christy Crisp, programs director for the historical society. In 1998, the organization resurrected the historical-marker program, and has erected aabout 150 in the past decade.

While many explain troop movements, others offer a few words about southern life during the war, she said. The society would like to erect 50 more markers that expand on the role of women, slaves, industry and other segments of life in the South a century-and-a-half ago, she said.

“There are a number of big-picture stories to tell,” she said. “We want people to go up to a marker and learn more about the bigger picture.”

But you cannot create the big picture until you have all the small pictures in one catalog. And so Hanley drives, and stops, and does it all again.

For more information about the search for markers, log on to www.georgiahistory.com or see Hanley’s blog.