Interesting concept...includes a Geiger researcher! Susan (This information is provided by the HPA for educational purposes.) September 7, 2000 Henry supports March to the Sea Heritage Trail Sherman & Co.: Markers will educate viewers about the devastation the Union general left in his wake. Bill Banks - For the Journal-Constitution Last month --- nearly 136 years after Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman gutted Atlanta, leaving a blackened, jagged city skyline --- Henry County's Board of Commissioners unanimously approved funds for Henry's portion of a March to the Sea Heritage Trail. Each site along the trail will offer an interpretive marker with text written by local historians emphasizing roles of local people. Maps and period photographs will highlight each marker. Every site will include a small parking area and state maps depicting the entire route. Eighty percent of the project is funded by federal monies, and the balance is funded locally. The total cost for one site is about $12,500. The trail should be linked and operating by fall 2003. Visitors can follow the markers for an on-site education about how the Civil War dramatically affected the region. "War is cruelty," Sherman wrote to Atlanta's mayor in July 1864, "and you cannot refine it." For local historians and university-trained scholars alike, Sherman remains as complex as he was irritable. Whether a post-Napoleonic innovator or a modern barbarian, he undoubtedly pioneered the use of psychological warfare against enemy populations. "We cannot change the heart and minds of those people of the South," he wrote, "but we can make war so terrible (and) make them so sick of war, that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it." Yet the appeal of Sherman endures, primarily through the sheer audacity of his achievement. During the late summer of 1864 he torched Atlanta ---"Atlanta is ours and fairly won," he wrote Lincoln --- inflamed Jonesboro and left Lovejoy a smoldering ember. The infamous march commenced around Stockbridge in mid-November, and it ended when Sherman presented Lincoln with Savannah as a Christmas present. The general's left and right wings scorched a path through what is today 66 counties, 270 miles long and at times 60 miles wide. Sherman estimated damage to Confederate resources at $100 million, most of which, he wrote was "simple waste and destruction." The "march" has both enthralled and revolted Georgians ever since. Earlier this year, Charles Geiger, a volunteer with Georgia's Civil War Heritage Trails Inc., began organizing a thoroughly mapped and documented Sherman March trail. Geiger contacted Chamber of Commerce groups and dozens of local and regional historians with access to oral histories, diaries and letters. Many book-length studies present history through the heads of generals and politicians, but Geiger assembled his narrative from those who plowed the land and trampled the long, dusty roads. Last spring Geiger met McDonough's Mark Pollard and knew instantly he'd found a kindred soul. Pollard is a hard-core Civil War re-enactor who admits he sometimes bathes with lye soap. Pollard meticulously mapped the movements of Sherman's right wing through Henry County. He then proposed three sites to the Henry Board of Commissioners: The Hodnett's Mill site, on Stagecoach Road, just north of Stockbridge near current baseball diamonds. The 17th U.S. Army camped here Nov. 15, 1864. The Charles Walker Plantation site --- the house burned a decade ago --- where the 17th U.S. Army camped on Nov. 16, 1864. This is on Ga. 155, about two miles north of McDonough. The Hazlehurst House, built in 1829 and today in near-mint condition, off the square in McDonough. The 15th U.S. Army camped and headquartered here on Nov. 16, 1864. Henry was mostly spared the Union's pyromania. According to McDonough legend, a "Dr. Tye," who performed surgery on many visiting Yankees, told Union officers he couldn't work with smoke in his eyes. Nevertheless there were unforgivable indignities. Joseph Moore, the Clayton and Henry historian, said that "soldiers dug up graves in the McDonough cemetery and stole jewelry off the bodies. They also destroyed monuments, so many people didn't know where their relatives were buried. "Also," said Moore, "they used the sanctuary of the Baptist church as a slaughterhouse. So, no, they didn't burn anything in McDonough, but these Yankees weren't anybody to admire." They saved their matches for Butts and the remaining 65 counties. All told, about 70,000 soldiers comprised Sherman's two wings, not including the emancipated slaves who abandoned their plantations and followed the army. In "The Souls of Black Folk," W.E.B. DuBois wrote that nothing "speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them . . . ." Pollard, the re-enactor, put it this way: "We'll never begin to feel what they felt until we've followed in their footsteps, or walked in their shoes. Except, by that point in the war, not many of the Southern boys had any shoes left." Copyright 2000 Cox Interactive Media http://www.hpa.org/