Marietta Statue Honors Woman Who Saved Confederate Cemetery
By Joe Kirby
November 2004

MARIETTA, Ga. - The Confederate Cemetery in this city in Atlanta's northern suburbs holds the remains of more men in gray than any other such graveyard between Richmond and Atlanta. And a bronze statue was erected in late September to honor the woman who did the most to preserve it and ensure its survival.

Mattie Harris Lyon (1850-1947) is not a name known to many current residents and certainly not to many beyond Marietta's borders. But her efforts in the 1920s were instrumental in the survival of the cemetery.

The graveyard was established in 1863 on the then-outskirts of town next to the Old Marietta Cemetery, which in turn adjoins Marietta City Cemetery. The first burials were soldiers who died in nearby hospitals and in a severe train wreck nearby. Burials continued during the battle for Kennesaw Mountain three miles north of town, then ended when the town fell to Union Gen. William T. Sherman.

Immediately after the war, Marietta hotelier and native New Yorker Henry Cole donated several acres of land across town for a cemetery for war dead of both sides. He now is believed to have been a Yankee spy and it was his hotel where Andrews' Raiders spent the night before hijacking a Confederate train and beginning what now is known as "The Great Locomotive Chase."

The people of Marietta refused to inter their dead alongside those of the Union and resumed burying them in the informal Confederate graveyard, with its owner's permission. The burial ground on the Cole property, meanwhile, grew to hold the remains of thousands of Union dead, most of them unknown and relocated from battlefields around northwest Georgia. It became the nucleus for the Marietta National Cemetery.

Local legend has it that a row of trees, now long gone, was planted along one side of the City Square so those there would not have to be offended by the sight of the Yankee cemetery on the distant hilltop.

The remains of more than 3,000 dead Confederates soon filled the Confederate Cemetery, as bodies were brought there after the war from the Chickamauga and Ringgold battlefields. The great majority were unknowns, and very few were reburied with any type of headstone. Representatives from every Confederate state are known to be buried there.

Later burials included residents of the Confederate Veteransí Home in Atlanta. The cemetery is still the site of the local Confederate Memorial Day celebration each year and it remains a well-visited tourist attraction.

Standing vigil over the cemetery is one of four cannon that once served the old Georgia Military Academy, which stood several hundred yards south on Powder Springs Street from 1852 to 1864. The cannon was captured by Sherman, held as a war trophy and not returned until 1910.

While the Marietta National Cemetery was maintained in park-like status by the federal government, the Confederate Cemetery quickly became overgrown and ill tended, as the state lacked funds to take care of it during the hard postwar years and after.

By the early part of the last century, the graveyard was in such bad shape that the bones of the dead could be seen protruding from the road bank along the cemetery.

At that point, "Miss Mattie," as Lyon was known, began a lobbying effort as the head of the newly formed Ladies Memorial Foundation. The group ultimately persuaded the State of Georgia to fence the burial ground and mark the graves with stones in the late 1920s. The tidy rows of headstones seen today, however, are believed to bear little correspondence with the actual rows of bodies because by the time they were placed, there was little way of telling where the burials had taken place.

Mrs. Lyon also was president of the Kennesaw chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and helped form the first Red Cross chapter in town.

The impetus for the statue in her memory came from the recently formed Confederate Cemetery Foundation.

"As we learned more about Miss Mattie we realized she was such an important part of Marietta," said Foundation president Betty Hunter, who also serves on the Marietta City Council. "These ladies had hoped it would be a garden in memory of these men, and we refer to it as our 'Garden of Heroes.' They never were able to raise all the money they wanted and make it a beauty spot like it was planned to be, so we have tried to take it up where they left off."

Hunter added, "Two of Miss Mattie's three stepbrothers never returned from the war, so she probably was doing for others what she hoped someone was doing for her family members' remains."