Sean P. Graham - Kennesaw: Natural History of a Southern Mountain

In early days (1844), when a lieutenant of the 3rd artillery, I had been sent from Charleston, South Carolina, to Marietta Georgia... we remained in Marietta about six weeks, during which time I repeatedly rode to Kenesaw Mountain, and over the very ground where afterward, in 1864, we had some hard battles. Thus by a mere accident I was enabled to traverse on horseback the very ground where in after-years I had to conduct vast armies and fight great battles. That the knowledge thus acquired was of infinite use to me, and consequently to the Government, I have always felt and stated.

William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman

THE MOUNTAIN S NAME IS SUPPOSED to derive from the Cherokee word ga-ni-sa, which means burial place. But this seems almost too appropriate to be true, and the Cherokee were forced from this place too long ago to know for sure how it got the name or what exactly it means. Little prehistoric archaeology has been done on Kennesaw. In any case, mountains arent good places to reconstruct the ancient past because they are sites of erosion, rather than places where artifacts get buried. Kennesaw Mountain lies on the divide between the Chattahoochee and Etowah Rivers, along whose valleys Native Americans settled and built towns. The woods near Kennesaw were once the frontier between Creek and Cherokee land and were probably visited only occasionally for the purpose of hunting or perhaps gathering medicinal plants. But we can be certain the mountain had some significance for Native Americans, since most noteworthy places did.

Although it is certainly striking, Kennesaw is hardly a mountain. Somebody from Colorado or Alaska would understandably scoff at the idea of calling this lovely, camel-humped hill a mountain. And if were going to be completely honest, even by Georgia standards its not very impressive. Compared to mountains of the Blue Ridge in northern Georgia its just a pile of rocks. Its no Brasstown Bald, Hightower Bald, Rabun Bald, Blood Mountain, Rich Mountain, or Fort Mountain. Even though its as tall as some of the ridges of northwest Georgialike Taylors Ridge, Johns Mountain, or Rocky Faceits not nearly as long. Geologically, it has little similarity to the ridges of northwest Georgia or to the mountains of the Blue Ridge. Its a monadnock, or, if you prefer, an inselberg, which are fancy words for a large, isolated, solid rock outcrop. In this way Kennesaw is more similar to nearby Stone Mountain. But even there the similarity is superficial because Stone Mountain is made of a different kind of rock than Kennesaw, and the two mountains had very different beginnings.

Figure 1. Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. Photograph by Sean P. Graham.

The mountains two humps are known locally as Big and Little Kennesaw, and the rocks that make up the mountain continue on, with diminished height, as Pigeon and Cheatham Hills. At 1,808 feet above sea level, the peak of Big Kennesaw rises a mere 608 feet above the floor of old farmland and subdivisions below. Its length stretches all of a mile before it disappears again below the surrounding Georgia red clay. The only thing that makes it stand out is how utterly ordinary the Piedmont terrain surrounding the mountain is.