To the uninitiated, the land is hardly worth a second glance. It’s filled with mature pines and younger hardwoods, a cool patch of green brushing against hot blacktop.
But to Civil War enthusiasts, the 16-acre tract beside Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park is a slice of history deserving preservation.
On a summer morning 147 years ago, Union soldiers crept through the site on their way to a key skirmish in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, a pivotal conflict in Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea.
The privately owned tract on Burnt Hickory Road is for sale for $2.7 million. Officials at the national park want it.
The only problem, said the man who’s made acquiring the land a personal quest, is one that bedevils preservationists everywhere.
“We have to get the money,” said amateur historian Brad Quinlin, who routinely visits the park to wander the ridges where two armies bled on a hot morning so long ago. “That’s why I want to preserve the land — to tell the stories of the men who fell in battle.”
It’s a story worth telling, Quinlin thinks, especially in this first year of the four-year sesquicentennial of that 1861-65 war.
William R. Johnson, the park’s lead ranger and historian thinks the park needs to get the property before developers do.
“By putting it in the park, it becomes part of the battlefield,” he said. “It won’t become something else.”
But times are tight, and Kennesaw Mountain isn’t the only park wanting to expand.
Mountain in the way
He was known as the “fighting parson,” an ordained Baptist minister who re-entered the U.S. Army in 1861 after leaving the service 10 years earlier. Union Gen. Joseph Lightburn of West Virginia was part of Sherman’s army that pushed steadily south.
By late June 1864, Union forces had fought from Tennessee into North Georgia. They were pushing toward Atlanta, the Confederacy’s transportation and communications hub. But Kennesaw Mountain, heavily guarded by Confederates, lay in their path. Union soldiers waited for the order to attack.
It came the morning of June 27. Lightburn’s men marched through marshy woodland toward Pigeon Hill, close to the mountain. The hill came by its name honestly: soldiers and civilians alike noted the thousands of carrier pigeons that roosted in the hill’s trees.
Lightburn’s forces routed Confederates near the hill, only to run into entrenched enemy soldiers in the heights above them. The attack failed; Lightburn’s forces had to withdraw.
Union troops elsewhere ran into identical opposition — an established enemy holding the high ground. The battle for Kennesaw Mountain was a Union defeat. Conservative estimates place northern troop losses at about 3,000; southern casualties exceeded 1,000. Yet the battle proved only a temporary setback for Union soldiers.
In their push south, Union forces consistently tried to flank the Confederate lines. Each effort forced Confederate troops to withdraw so they could stop the northern soldiers from slipping past their lines. When Confederate forces abandoned Kennesaw Mountain to stop another flanking maneuver, Sherman fixed his smoldering gaze on Atlanta.
The soldiers left behind torn terrain that would become a national park where joggers huff past long-abandoned trenches and breastworks where cannons once roared. An average 1.5 million people a year — that’s more than 28,000 a week — visit the place where thousands fell and died.
‘Sacred ground’
When he was a kid growing up in Massachusetts, Brad Quinlin read everything he could about war — the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the world wars.
“My stepfather joked that I was going to grow up to be a mass murderer,” Quinlin said.
Instead, he became a grocer, and in 1982 moved to Atlanta. “For a guy who loved the Civil War, I came to a perfect spot.”
Quinlin, now retired, immersed himself in the area’s history. He became a re-enactor in Civil War battles — he suited up for the Union side — and joined the Kennesaw Mountain Historical Association, founded more than 60 years ago to support activities at the 2,900-acre park.
As a member of the organization, he learned about the tract where Lightburn mounted his assault. The site is near the intersection of Burnt Hickory and Old Mountain Road.
The owners, a local family, don’t want to discuss the possible sale, federal officials say.
On a recent morning, Quinlin visited the site. The hiss of passing traffic on Burnt Hickory Road faded as he walked into the woods. He gestured at the forest floor, damp underfoot.
“It’s important to tell the story of the men who sacrificed their lives here,” he said. “This is sacred ground.”
In May, with the Kennesaw Mountain Historic Association’s blessing, Quinlin visited Washington, urging Georgia lawmakers to include the purchase in the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The fund is created by annual user fees paid by companies drilling offshore for oil and natural gas. Last fiscal year, it totaled more than $126 million.
Federal agencies, as well as state and local governments, use the fund to buy land and waterways for recreation, conservation and historic purposes. Money from the fund, for example, bought thousands of acres for the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area.
Lawmakers, said Quinlin, “were very kind” during his three-day visit.
Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., whose congressional district includes the national battlefield, would like to see the park’s holdings expand.
“It is important that the history of the Civil War is accurately preserved for our community and all those who visit our national parks,” he said in a statement.
The land is remarkably untouched since that long-ago battle, said Michael Stoudemire, the historic association’s executive director.
“It’s pretty much in the same condition as it was on the day of the attack,” he said.
The site is just one of many the National Park Service would like to acquire, said Jeffrey Olson, a spokesman for the federal agency. “There’s a long, long list” of proposed acquisitions, he said. “It can take a long time to ... get funding.”
That makes Quinlin uneasy. If the economy improves, he said, a developer might buy the tract for new homes. Bulldozers could claw away the places where soldiers from West Virginia and Ohio crouched in the dirt and wrote letters home.
So, like those long ago soldiers, he waits. Atlanta didn’t fall in one day. Getting money from Washington won’t happen overnight.
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