Marietta, Georgia

• 1. Introduction

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  Marietta, Georgia sits just twenty miles southeast of Atlanta, a city of roughly sixty thousand people that has spent nearly two centuries accumulating history it did not always ask for. It began as a railroad junction. It survived three fires in a single decade. It watched a locomotive get stolen from under its nose. And it was the site of one of the most notorious lynchings in twentieth-century American history, an act of mob violence that helped give birth to the Anti-Defamation League.

  The questions worth asking about Marietta are not the obvious ones. Not just how it grew, but how it kept its identity across so many collisions with larger forces. What does a city become when it sits at the intersection of the Civil War, the railroads, Jim Crow, and the postwar Sun Belt boom? And what does it mean that a landmark known across Georgia is a giant chicken sitting on top of a fast-food restaurant on U.S. 41?

• 2. A Town Built for the Rails

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  Homes were appearing near the Cherokee town of Big Shanty before 1824, years before Marietta had a formal name or a legal identity. The first plot was laid out in 1833, and on the 19th of December 1834, the Georgia General Assembly gave the community its official recognition.

  Marietta was initially chosen as the hub for the new Western and Atlantic Railroad, and for a brief period the town's future looked like it would be written in steam and freight. By 1838, roadbed and trestles had already been built north of the city. Two years later, political wrangling halted construction, and by 1842 the railroad's new management moved the hub away from Marietta to an area that would eventually become Atlanta. When the railroad finally began operation in 1850, Marietta still shared in the prosperity, but it no longer held the wheel.

  The businessman John Glover arrived in 1848 and became the city's first mayor when it incorporated in 1852. Physician Carey Cox, another early resident, promoted a "water cure" that drew tourists to the area and earned him recognition from the Cobb County Medical Society as the county's first physician. The Georgia Military Institute opened in 1851, the first bank followed in 1855, and during that same decade fire swept through the city on three separate occasions, each time destroying much of what had been built.

• 3. The Great Locomotive Chase

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  On the morning of the 12th of April 1862, a group of men boarded a train in Marietta. They were not ordinary passengers. James Andrews, a civilian working alongside Union forces, had arrived in Marietta with a small party of Union soldiers dressed in civilian clothes. The night before, the group stayed at the Fletcher House hotel, positioned directly in front of the Western and Atlantic Railroad.

  The plan was to seize a locomotive, drive it north toward Chattanooga, and destroy the railroad line along the way. The goal was to cut the Confederate stronghold off from Atlanta. When the train made its scheduled stop at Big Shanty, the other passengers stepped off for breakfast. Andrews and his men did not. They took the engine, called The General, along with the car carrying the fuel, and headed north.

  The episode that followed became known as the Great Locomotive Chase. It ended badly for the Raiders. Andrews and all of his men were captured within two weeks, including two who had arrived late and missed the hijacking entirely. All were tried as spies, convicted, and hanged. The Fletcher House hotel survived the war and would later become known as the Kennesaw House; it is now one of only four commercial buildings in Marietta that were not burned to the ground during Sherman's March to the Sea.

• 4. Sherman, Burning, and the Aftermath

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  By the time the Civil War reached Marietta in 1864, the city had already recovered from the fires of the 1850s. General William Tecumseh Sherman swept through during the Atlanta campaign in the summer of that year. The Confederate dead from the Battle of Atlanta, more than three thousand soldiers, came to rest in the Marietta Confederate Cemetery.

  Oakton House, built in 1838 and the oldest continuously occupied residence in Marietta, served as the headquarters of Major General Loring during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864. Its original barn, milk house, smokehouse, and well house all survived. The boxwood parterre in its gardens dates to the 1870s.

  In November 1864, General Hugh Kilpatrick set the town ablaze. This was the opening strike of Sherman's March to the Sea. Sherman's troops crossed the Chattahoochee River at a shallow section called the Palisades, after burning the Marietta Paper Mills near the mouth of Sope Creek. The Kennesaw House, the former Fletcher House where Andrews and his Raiders had slept two years earlier, survived that burning. The 1898-built railroad depot, now a visitor center, still stands a block west of the town square.

• 5. Leo Frank and a City's Reckoning

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  Leo Frank was lynched at 1200 Roswell Road, just east of Marietta, on the 17th of August 1915. Frank, a Jewish-American superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, had been convicted on the 25th of August 1913, of murdering one of his factory workers, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. The case was sensationalized in the local press, which portrayed Frank as sexually depraved, and it captured public attention across the state.

  Governor John Slaton commuted Frank's death sentence to life imprisonment, citing problems with the case against him. The commutation provoked fury. A mob threatened Slaton so severely that the Georgia National Guard was called to defend him, and he left the state permanently, his political career destroyed.

  A second mob, systematically organized for the purpose, abducted Frank from prison, drove him to Marietta, and hanged him. The leaders of the abduction included people who held or had held elected office at every level: two state legislators, the mayor, a former governor, a clergyman, two former Superior Court justices, and an ex-sheriff. The killing was not spontaneous. In direct response to the Frank lynching, Jewish activists created the Anti-Defamation League, an organization built to educate Americans about Jewish life and culture and to work against anti-Semitism.

• 6. Race, Education, and the Long Wait

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  In 1892, Marietta established a public school system. It included Marietta High School and Waterman Street School for white students. A school for black students was created on Lemon Street at the same time. The Georgia state government, however, did not provide a high school for black students until 1924, when Booker T. Washington High School opened in Atlanta. That opening came only after decades of requests from Black citizens for educational resources.

  The gap between those two dates, 1892 and 1924, represents a full generation of students whose educational options were shaped by deliberate exclusion. Marietta's school system has since moved in a different direction. By 2008, the Marietta City Schools became only the second International Baccalaureate World School district in Georgia authorized to offer the IB Middle Years Program for grades six through ten. The system now offers the full IB continuum from kindergarten through twelfth grade, one of only a few districts in the country to do so.

  Kennesaw State University's Marietta Campus, formerly Southern Polytechnic State University before the merger, and Life University together serve more than twenty thousand students in more than ninety programs of study.

• 7. Landmarks and Local Character

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  East Marietta National Little League won the 1983 Little League World Series, defeating the team from Barahona, Dominican Republic in the championship game. It is a fact that sits quietly in the record books, specific and concrete, the kind of local pride that does not require a monument.

  The Big Chicken, constructed in 1963, has been a landmark on U.S. 41 and Roswell Road since it was built. It sits atop a KFC restaurant and has served as a navigational reference point for generations of Marietta residents. In the same year it was built, an explosion at Atherton's Drugstore on Marietta Square on Halloween night killed six people and injured twenty-three others.

  Miramax Films and Disney filmed scenes of the 1995 movie Gordy in Marietta. The 2014 film Dumb and Dumber To filmed a scene on Marietta Square. The Marietta Gone with the Wind Museum, housed in the Historic Brumby Hall, holds a private collection of memorabilia tied to the book and the film. The William Root House Museum and Garden, built around 1845, is the oldest wood-frame house still standing in the city. Root himself was one of Marietta's earliest merchants, with a drugstore on the Square.

  The CSX freight trains between Atlanta and Chattanooga, running the Western and Atlantic Subdivision, still pass a block west of the town square. Dansby Swanson, the first overall pick in the 2015 MLB draft and a Major League Baseball player for the Chicago Cubs, is among Marietta's notable former residents.