Georgia Natural Wonder #133 - Marietta (Part 4). 1,050

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Georgia Natural Wonder #133 - Marietta (Part 4)

We came to Kennesaw Mountain for Georgia Natural Wonder #133 (Part 1). We covered the Antebellum Era of Marietta with Georgia Natural Wonder #133 (Part 2). Our last post covered a good portion of the Civil War History of Marietta and Cobb County with Georgia Natural Wonder #133 (Part 3). A post soon will cover the Dead Angle and the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain June 27, 1864, it was the site of the only major Confederate victory in General William T. Sherman's invasion of Georgia. Today's post covers the history of Marietta from the Civil War to the present. After the war Cobb County, for the next three-quarters of a century, suffered the same afflictions that plagued most of Georgia: a depressed farm economy, low-wage industries, and one-party politics built on white supremacy.




There is a tremendous preservation of so many Victorian Homes in Marietta.

Ride through some of these Victorian neighborhoods and find these Funky Public gardens ......



with sculptures everywhere.





Marietta's postwar history paralleled that of the rest of Georgia. Outside the city there were too many cotton farms for the surrounding countryside to support comfortably, but the city itself produced a prosperous business and professional class that built fine homes throughout the downtown area, many of which are still standing. Near the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the Marietta elite established a number of cotton, flour, paper, and marble mills, along with chair factories and machineworks.


Old factories are condo's today.


1912 Marietta.

Rocking Chairs and Locomotives

The Brumby Chair Company produced rocking chairs that were in demand nationwide.The Brumby Rocker is a rocking chair built by the Brumby Chair Factory of the Brumby Chair Company in Marietta, Georgia, which operated between 1875 and 1942, or by its successor which started in 1972. They are big, sturdy, built to last, and difficult to manufacture. New ones cost about $1,000. Jimmy Carter brought five to the White House. The chair is deliberately large, with large arms, seat, and "runners", and a very high back.



James (Jim) Remley Brumby, co-founder and first president of The Brumby Chair Company in 1875, was a cadet at the Georgia Military Institute which was founded by his uncle, Colonel Anoldus V. Brumby, a graduate of West Point. Eventually, he was sent to the Army of Virginia under General Robert E. Lee.



At the end of the war, when 19-year-old Jim returned to Marietta to mend his broken fortunes, he found his hometown ravaged by Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea. After the war, Jim realized returning soldiers would have to rebuild the South he loved so well.



He sent to Mississippi for his younger brother Thomas M. Brumby in 1875, and they operated as Brumby and Brother until the Brumby Chair Co. was incorporated in 1884.


The old Brumby Factory are Condos now.

4sure addendum - The Glover Machine Works found an international market for its narrow-gauge locomotives. The last locomotive they built is on a covered display across the railroad from the Kennesaw House hotel.



Glover Machine Works was never as big of a locomotive builder as Baldwin Locomotive Works or American Locomotive Co. (ALCO).



The history of Glover Machine Works starts in 1892, when James Bolan“Bolie” Glover II bought the Phoenix Foundry and Machine Shop. In 1895, he changed the name of the company to Glover Machine Works.



The company built 200 locomotives between May 6, 1902, and April 19, 1930. But, more than anything, its impact on helping the south recover after the Civil War is immeasurable.



The building is gone now. It was at the corner of Atlanta Road and S. Cobb Drive. The Cobb Water system has a building on that property now.



There is a book available...Glover Steam Locomotives by Richard Hillman. Lots of images and history, etc.



Today, there are few remnants of this fascinating locomotive builder.



Its historic 11-acre campus in Marietta, where the company moved in 1903, was razed in 1995, but its archives, patterns and locomotive parts survive at the Southern Locomotive of Civil War and Locomotive History in nearby Kennesaw, Ga.



Lynching of Leo Frank

In 1915 the county gained infamy for the lynching of an Atlanta Jewish supervisor of an Atlanta pencil factory, Leo Frank. He was convicted of murdering one of his workers, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, formerly of Cobb County. The Governor stayed his execution and Frank, was kidnapped from his jail cell in Milledgeville, and brought to Frey's Gin, two miles east of Marietta, where he was lynched.


Folks still leave toys at Mary Phagan grave in Marietta City Cemetery today.

The case became known throughout the nation. The degree of anti-Semitism involved in Frank's conviction was enough of a factor to have inspired Jews, and others, throughout the country to protest the conviction of an innocent man.


Frank and wife at trial.

Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, still on procedural grounds, denied Frank's appeals; however, a minority of two, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes, dissented. They noted that the trial was conducted in an atmosphere of public hostility: "Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury."


Little Mary Phagan.

Thomas E. Watson, a former Populist and the publisher of the Jeffersonian, had conducted a campaign denouncing Frank that struck a chord, and Georgians responded to it. Watson's accusations against Jews and Leo Frank, in particular, increased the paper's sales and elicited enormous numbers of letters praising him and his publication. As Watson continued to fan the flames of public outrage, his readership grew. By the time Slaton reviewed the case, there was tremendous pressure from the public to let the courts' verdicts stand.


Tyrone Brooks stands by old Watson statute since removed from state capital grounds to across street.

Georgia governor John M. Slaton commuted the sentence, however, to life imprisonment, assuming that Frank's innocence would eventually be fully established and he would be set free. Slaton's decision enraged much of the Georgia populace, leading to riots throughout Atlanta, as well as a march to the governor's mansion by some of his more virulent opponents. The governor declared martial law and called out the National Guard. When Slaton's term as governor ended a few days later, police escorted him to the railroad station, where he and his wife boarded a train and left the state, not to return for a decade.



The spectacle of a Jim Crow–era court relying on a black man’s testimony to convict a white man of murder was remarkable, but the nation remembers the case because of what happened next.



After Slaton's commutation, Frank was interned at a prison farm in Milledgeville for just under two months. During his internment, a fellow prisoner slashed Frank's throat with a knife, though he survived. Frank's stay at the prison farm was cut short on the night of August 16, 1915, when twenty-five prominent citizens of Marietta, identifying themselves as the Knights of Mary Phagan, caravanned to Milledgeville, took Frank from his cell, and drove him back to Marietta, Phagan's hometown, where they hanged him from an oak tree.



The ringleaders were well known locally but were not named publicly until June 2000. The list included

Joseph Mackey Brown, former governor of Georgia;

Eugene Herbert Clay, former mayor of Marietta and later president of the Georgia Senate;

E. P. Dobbs, mayor of Marietta at the time;

Moultrie McKinney Sessions, lawyer and banker; part of the Marietta delegation at Governor Slaton's clemency hearing;

Several current and former Cobb County sheriffs; and other individuals of various professions. Only months later, many of these same men would take part in the nighttime ceremony at Stone Mountain that established the modern Ku Klux Klan.



A site at Frey's Gin, two miles east of Marietta, had been prepared, complete with a rope and table supplied by former Sheriff William Frey. The New York Times reported Frank was handcuffed, his legs tied at the ankles, and that he was hanged from a branch of a tree at around 7:00 a.m., facing the direction of the house where Phagan had lived. This is south of Highway 120 between the Big Chicken and west of I-75.



A crowd of nearly three thousand people gathered the next morning in Marietta to view Frank's hanging body. The crowd grew increasingly unruly, and undertakers had to wrestle Frank's body away before it could be further battered.



The Atlanta Journal wrote that a crowd of men, women, and children arrived on foot, in cars, and on horses, and that souvenir hunters cut away parts of his shirt sleeves. According to The New York Times, one of the onlookers, Robert E. Lee Howell – related to Clark Howell, editor of The Atlanta Constitution – wanted to have the body cut into pieces and burned, and began to run around, screaming, whipping up the mob. Judge Newt Morris tried to restore order, and asked for a vote on whether the body should be returned to the parents intact; only Howell disagreed. When the body was cut down, Howell started stamping on Frank's face and chest; Morris quickly placed the body in a basket, and he and his driver John Stephens Wood drove it out of Marietta.



Leo Frank's trial had far-reaching impacts. It inspired the formation of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the nation's foremost civil rights organizations. In 1986 the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned Frank.



In 1915 Georgia musician Fiddlin' John Carson wrote a ballad about Mary Phagan, which he performed on the steps of the state capitol to protest the commutation of Frank's sentence. Ten years later the song was recorded as "Little Mary Phagan" by Moonshine Kate, Carson's daughter.

Little Mary Phagan, she went to town one day
She went to the pencil fact'ry, to get her little pay
She left her home at eleven, when she kissed her mother good-bye
Not one time did the po' child think, that she was goin' right to die

Leo Frank met her, with a blues we hardly know
He smiled and said, "Lil' Mary, now you go home no mo'"
He sneaked along behind her, 'til she reached the little room
He laughed and said, "Lil' Mary, you met your fatal doom."

She fell upon her knees, to Leo Frank she pled
Because she was virtuous, he hit her across the head
The tears rolled down her rosy cheeks, the blood flowed down her back
She remembered tellin' her mother what time she would be back

He killed lil' Mary Phagan, was on one holiday
Then called for ol' Jim Conley to take her body away
He took her to the basement, bound hand and feet
Down in the basement, lil' Mary lay asleep

Newt Lee was the watchman, when he went to wind the key
Down in the basement, lil' Mary he could see
He called for the officers, their names I do not know
They came to the pencil factr'y, saying, "Newt Lee, you must go."

They took him to the jailhouse, locked him in a cell
The poor ol' innocent nigga, knew nothin' for to tell
I have a notion in my head, when Frank comes to die
He took his damnation in the courthouse in the sky

The astonished asked the question, the angels they do say
Why he kill lil' Mary, upon one holiday?
Come all of you good people, wherever you may be
Supposin' little Mary belonged to you or me?

Her mother sets a-weepin'
She weeps and mourns all day
She prays to meet her baby
In a better world some day

Judge Roan passed the sentence
You bet he passed it well
Solicitor Hugh M. Dorsey
Sent Leo Frank to Hell

Popular interpretations of the case include the film They Won't Forget (1937), based on Ward Greene's fictionalized account Death in the Deep South (1936), with Lana Turner playing the victim in her first credited screen role. There was the television mini-series The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988), starring Jack Lemmon as Governor John Slaton.



Another Famous murdered Child rest in Marietta, JonBenét Ramsey.


JonBenét's grave is at Saint James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia.

Marietta City Cemetery

The Marietta City Cemetery was established in the 1830s and provides the final resting place for a broad cross section of the community's early residents, notably without the barriers between different races, religions and backgrounds common to Georgia at that time. We covered the Confederate Cemetery with our last post, this earlier adjacent cemetery is final resting place of Mary Phagan as noted. Several former mayors of Marietta and one former mayor of Smyrna are buried here. Steadman Vincent Sanford, former president of the University of Georgia, whose name the school's football stadium now bears, also rests here.


The Greatest Friend the University of Georgia ever had.

Here, too, is U.S. Senator Alexander Stephens Clay, the only Cobb County native ever elected to the U.S. Senate.


Statute in downtown Marietta Courthouse park.

The Marietta City Cemetery is filled with people who overcame tremendous odds to make a positive impact on the lives of the people in their community. Reverend Thomas Milton Allen is one of them Born in servitude in 1833, Allen was a former slave who became an early leader in Marietta's African-American community. He became a charter member of Zion Baptist Church, founded in 1866, and later served as its second pastor. Allen went on to organize Cole Street Baptist Church (later known as Pleasant Grove Baptist Church) and Whitlock Avenue Baptist Church. He also founded the first association for African-American churches in 1890.



Also of interest is the grave of Daniel Webster Blair. The longtime superior court judge was one of the first judges in Georgia to take a strong stand against the Ku Klux Klan during the organization's resurgence in the early 1920s.In a scathing denunciation from the bench, he called for the prompt and strict prosecution of everyone who wore hoods to conceal their identity.



Civil War Confederate Army Officer William Phillips. Namesake of the Phillips Legion, in the months before the start of the Civil War, he was a Colonel on Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown's staff. In January of 1861, he accompanied the Governor in the seizure of a huge Federal arsenal near Augusta. Brown assigned him the rank of Brigadier General and put him in command of the 4th Georgia State brigade. They eventually became known as Phillips Legion. However, he was not a General in the Confederate army. When his brigade was called up, the Governor refused to send them unless Phillips' was promoted to the rank of General. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who considered him a "non-military leader," refused. He was eventually commissioned as a Confederate Colonel. The Phillips Legion was in several skirmishes before he was striken with typhoid fever. After recuperating for several months, he rejoined the Legion which had been commanded by Lt. Colonel Seaborn Jones in his absence. Brown continued to request a General's rank for Phillips. However, in August of 1862, he fell ill once more. In February of 1863, after being found unfit for military duty due to his health, he resigned his commission, leaving behind the Legion that still carried his name. After the war, he served as the assistant attorney general and in the Georgia State legislature. He was also the president of the Marietta and North Georgia Railroad.



Throughout the cedar-scented grounds of the Marietta City Cemetery are reminders of each era of Marietta's history.



The Old Slave Lot occupies one of the largest single plots in the cemetery.



The Lady In Black referenced the memorial to Mary Annie Gartrell erected by her grieving sister Lucy Gartrell. Lucy visited this grave from her Atlanta home at least twice-weekly for 48 years, many times on foot. Dressed always in mourning clothes, Lucy became known on the streets of Marietta as "The Lady in Black."



Cotton farming in the area peaked from the 1890s through the 1920s. Low prices during the Great Depression resulted in the cessation of cotton farming throughout Cobb County. The price of cotton went from 16¢ per pound in 1920 to 9.5¢ in 1930. This resulted in a cotton bust for the county, which had stopped growing the product but was milling it. This bust was in turn, followed by the Great Depression. To help combat the bust, the state started work on a road in 1922 that would later become U.S. 41, later replaced by Cobb Parkway in the late 1940s and early 1950s.


Traffic was fucked up before widening Hwy. 41, but look bottom left .... gas only cost 25 cents a gallon back then.

Wages were low, however, and young people moved north in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed. As late as 1940 the population of Marietta was below 9,000 and that of Cobb County just above 38,000.

Growth since World War II

The turning point for the county's economic transformation came with World War II. County attorney James V. Carmichael, Marietta mayor L. M. "Rip" Blair, and county commissioner George McMillan, aided by Marietta native General Lucius D. Clay, joined to bring to town a branch of the Bell Aircraft Corporation. Marietta seemed to be an ideal site for the bomber plant due to the availability of the air field and proximity to Atlanta.



U.S. 41 was then being constructed near the site, and a trolley line from Marietta to Atlanta would help bring in workers. The February 19 announcement added that Atlanta would furnish the plant with water. (On August 8, 1942 the army would complete a 20-inch water main from Atlanta to Marietta for the exclusive use of the Bell Bomber plant.)



The company put 28,158 people to work assembling B-29 Superfortresses. The vast majority of the laborers were natives of north Georgia.



At Bell Bomber they earned higher wages than they had ever received before and acquired job skills that prepared them well for the postwar years.



Even after the plant closed following the end of the war, Marietta experienced little unemployment and few vacant houses. A number of former aircraft workers started their own businesses, others found employment in Atlanta's automobile assembly plants, and the rest found factory or service jobs that kept them in the area.



Dobbins ARB was originally intended to be an alternate field for Atlanta, Georgia's Candler Field, and was to be named Rickenbacker Field, after World War One ace pilot Captain Eddie Rickenbacker. Now the story I heard was Eddie was touring the country for the site of an airfield and the Marietta folks wined and dined him and promised to name the air field after him and it was a genius sales job Marietta and Georgia have gained from ever since.


Ace and later in life after plane crash.

With the onset of World War Two, and considerable wrangling with the Navy over the field, the would-be Rickenbacker Field came into the possession of the US Army Air Force, which named the field Marietta Army Airfield, and announced the creation of a new aircraft factory nearby. This factory produced B-29 Superfortress bombers, which were then acceptance tested at Marietta Airfield. By the end of the war, the factory had produced, and Marietta Airfield had tested, 357 B29As and 311 B29Bs, for missions in Europe and the Pacific.



After the war, Marietta Army Airfield became home to units for the Georgia Air National Guard, and Air Force Reserve units. In 1948 Marietta was renamed Marietta Air Force Base, and now housed the headquarters for the 116th Fighter Group and the headquarters of the 54th Fighter Wing. The base was again renamed in 1950, to Dobbins AFB, after a World War Two pilot Captain Charles M. Dobbins of Marietta who died near Sicily on July 11, 1943 when US Navy gunners who had earlier suffered a Luftwaffe attack mistakenly downed his C-47. He was flying his third mission of the day, dropping paratroopers.


A National marker in the City cemetery instead of the National cemetery.


Another Marietta native, George Fergus, was shot down over Germany according to Marietta History center exhibit.

The plant reopened in 1951 during the Korean War, when the air field was acquired by the Air Force, and renamed Dobbins AFB. The air force invited the Lockheed Corporation of California to reopen the mammoth Marietta facility. Bell Bomber was just an assembly plant, building the Boeing-designed B-29. Lockheed-Georgia became the nation's leading producer of transport planes. Lockheed-Georgia employed considerably more professional engineers, who in the early 1950s designed the workhorse C-130 Hercules transport plane (first production model rollout in 1955), an aircraft still in production a half century later.


C-130 with Lost Mountain on horizon. Our next GNW.

In the next decade the company designed and manufactured two larger cargo planes, the C-141 and the giant C-5 Galaxy (rollout in 1968).


C-5A - I don't see how they keep this up without the propellers spinning.

In 1995 Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta. As of 2003 the Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta employed about 7,000 workers on two major projects, the C-130J and the F-22 fighter plane.



Air Force Plant No. 6 on South Cobb Drive has housed two major airplane manufacturers, the Bell Aircraft Corporation during World War II (1941-45) and Lockheed (later Lockheed Martin), since the Korean War.



Dobbins Air Reserve Base and the Naval Air Station Atlanta are adjacent to the plant.



"In Cobb County and other sprawling Cold War suburbs from Orange County to Norfolk/Hampton Roads, the direct link between federal defense spending and local economic prosperity structured a bipartisan political culture of hawkish conservatism and material self-interest on issues of national security."



One of the only B-29's in existence. This plane bombed Tokyo and other Japanese Cities, probably killed thousands with incendiary bombs, 600,000 died one night in Tokyo.



The Aviation Wing is a growing collection of aircraft displayed on a 15 acre campus conveniently located at 555 Perrin Road, Marietta, Georgia. Just 4.5 miles west of I-75.



The Aviation Wing of Marietta features a variety of civilian and military aircraft from the latter half of the twentieth century.



The park also features several examples of aircraft that were produced right here in Marietta.



Aviation has been an integral part of Marietta’s history, and continues to be a prominent industry in the area.



The goal of Aviation Wing of Marietta is to tell the aviation story of our history and allow visitors to explore this important part of our community.



This park will open from winter hours March 7 2020.



As a result of the great migration to northern industrial centers, Cobb County's African American population dropped from 30 percent in 1900 to 4 percent in 1980. For much of the post–World War II era, about half of the county's tiny black population resided within the Marietta city limits. In the days of segregation Marietta maintained two high schools, Marietta High School for whites and Lemon Street High School for blacks.


Lemon Street being renovated now days.

The system was integrated in 1967 by eliminating Lemon Street and sending all students to Marietta High. In 1975 local civil rights activists won a significant victory in federal district court with Grogan v. Hunter, which challenged Marietta's gerrymandered ward map on the grounds that it diluted black voting strength and failed to maintain approximately the same number of voters in each district. In the next citywide election, Hugh Grogan became the first African American to win a seat on the city council.


Old Zion Church found by former slaves.

When county home rule was enacted statewide by amendment to the Georgia state constitution in the early 1960s, Ernest W. Barrett became the first chairman of the new county commission. The county courthouse, built in 1888, was demolished, spurring a law that now prevents counties from doing so without a referendum.



In the 1960s and 1970s, Cobb transformed from rural to suburban, as integration spurred white flight from the city of Atlanta, which by 1970 was majority-African-American. Real-estate booms drew rural white southerners and Rust Belt transplants, both groups mostly first-generation white-collar workers. Cobb County was the home of former segregationist and Georgia governor Lester Maddox.



In 1975, Cobb voters elected John Birch Society leader Larry McDonald to Congress, running in opposition to desegregation busing. A conservative Democrat, McDonald called for investigations into alleged plots by the Rockefellers and the Soviet Union to impose "socialist-one-world-government" and co-founded the Western Goals Foundation. In 1983, McDonald died aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by a Soviet fighter jet over restricted airspace. I-75 through the county is now named for him.



In the last two decades of the twentieth century the population of Marietta and Cobb County became more diverse as large numbers of African Americans and Hispanics relocated to the area. According to the 2000 census, approximately 30 percent of the Marietta population is black and 17 percent is Hispanic. Between 1980 and 2000 the proportion of African Americans rose from 4.5 percent to 18.8 percent, as a generally affluent black population joined the migration to the suburbs of Atlanta.



By 2003 the county's diversity extended to top leadership positions. An African American, Lee Rhyant, was general manager of the county's largest industrial employer, Lockheed Martin. The supervisor of Cobb's 4,600 county employees, David Hankerson, became Georgia's first African American county manager in 1993. And in 2002 Sam Olens became the first Jew elected to chair the Cobb County Commission. Indicative of the county's transformation, none of these firsts excited much public or media attention.



Betty L. Siegel, appointed president of Kennesaw State University in 1981, was the first woman ever to head a unit of the University System of Georgia. With Lisa A. Rossbacher's selection as president of Southern Polytechnic State University in 1998, women headed both of the county's public universities until Siegel's retirement in 2006. Marietta is home to two universities, Southern Polytechnic State University and Life University, a private chiropractic institution. Chattahoochee Technical College is located just outside the city limits, and Kennesaw State University is about eight miles from the center of town. In 2015, Southern Polytechnic and Kennesaw State University  were consolidated into one university, with Kennesaw State as the surviving institution.


Peace at KSU.

Growth in population and wealth contributed to the county's expanding political power. In the 1990s Cobb was the home base for Newt Gingrich, the first Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in forty years. In 1990, Republican Congressmen Newt Gingrich became Representative of a new district centered around Cobb County. In 1994, as Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in almost fifty years, Gingrich became Speaker of the House, thrusting Cobb County into the national spotlight.



Roy Barnes was Georgia's governor from 1999 to 2003.



In 1993, county commissioners passed a resolution condemning homosexuality and cut off funding for the arts after complaints about a community theater. After protests from gay rights organizations, organizers of the 1996 Summer Olympics pulled events out of Cobb County, including the Olympic Torch Relay. The county's inns were nevertheless filled at 100% of capacity for two months during the event.



In the 1990s and 2000s, Cobb's demographics changed. As Atlanta's gentrification reversed decades of white flight, middle-class African-Americans and Russian, Bosnian, Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Mexican and Central American immigrants moved to older suburbs in south and southwest Cobb. As newcomers flocked to the county, the population gradually became more diverse. By 1990, for the first time, less than half of Cobb's residents were natives of Georgia. During the 1990s the city's population grew by about 33 percent.


Kennestone Hospital.

In 2010, African-American Democrat David Scott was elected to Georgia's 13th congressional district, which included many of those suburbs. Cobb became the first Georgia county to participate in the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g) enabling local law officers to enforce immigration law.



Located in metropolitan Atlanta just north of the Chattahoochee River, the city of Marietta has a population of about 56,579, according to the 2010 census. Increasingly Marietta has experienced the problems associated with urban areas. Houses appreciate greatly in value, and as a result newcomers find it more difficult to buy their own homes. In 2000, 62 percent of the housing units were renter-occupied and only 38 percent owner-occupied, figures almost the reverse of those for the rest of the county.



One of the central issues of the 2001 mayoral and city council elections was how to stimulate economic revitalization in rundown parts of town. In one of his first actions as mayor, Bill Dunaway established a blue-ribbon redevelopment committee to generate a plan for continued economic growth. At the start of a new century, the people of Marietta appeared divided along ethnic and class lines. The town's future seemed to depend on its ability to maintain a vibrant economy and provide equitable services and opportunities for all its citizens.


Did I mention they were State Champs in football.

As of 2018, the population was 756,865,making it Georgia's third most-populous county. The county is home to prominent businesses and corporations, including Lockheed Martin and The Home Depot.



Let me give a shout out to Red Hair Brewing.



Marietta and Cobb County is included in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is situated immediately to the northwest of Atlanta's city limits.



Its Cumberland District, an edge city, has over 24,000,000 square feet of office space. I will do a future post on Vinings Mountain. As of 2017, Major League Baseball's Atlanta Braves play in Cumberland. Now named Truist Park.



The U.S. Census Bureau ranks Cobb County as the most-educated in the state of Georgia and 12th among all counties in the US. It has ranked among the top 100 highest-income counties in the United States. In October 2017, Cobb was ranked as the "Least Obese County in Georgia".



Cobb and Marietta are part of the world's largest toll-free calling zone. It is a zone spanning 7,162 square miles with four active telephone area codes.

Big Chicken

We can't come to Marietta without noting it's most prominent landmark. The Big Chicken.



Johnny Reb's Chick, Chuck and Shake owner S. R. "Tubby" Davis erected the 56-foot tall structure over his restaurant in 1963 as a method of advertising. The novelty architecture was designed by Hubert Puckett, a Georgia Tech student of architecture, and fabricated by Atlantic Steel.

1989

It was rebuilt following storm damage in 1993 and underwent a $2 million renovation project in 2017.



The Big Chicken is commonly used as a landmark for driving directions. Locals will often include "make a [turn] at the Big Chicken", or "it's about x miles past the Big Chicken".

Notable people

Bob Barr - politician; United States Representative, Republican Party; Libertarian Party candidate for President of the United States.



James V. Carmichael - member of the Georgia General Assembly, 1935-1940; candidate for governor of Georgia, 1946.



Louie Giglio - pastor, author, founder of the Passion Conferences, pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, head of sixstepsrecords.



Lil Yachty - rapper.



"Big Boss Man" (Ray Traylor) - professional wrestler; corrections officer.



We have been traveling a Mountain to Classic South theme in our Forum for a while now. I wanted to do ten each. We have done seven mountains and six Classic South. So we have seven spots left. Now we got stuck here in Cobb County with my naming Kennesaw Mountain as GNW #133. I did three tangents on Marietta. I found some old word documents where I covered the day by day Civil War March through Cobb County as I piggybacked on Bad Leroy's daily 150 years ago today. I realized Cobb County was too big to just tangent on Kennesaw Mountain, so I just did Marietta. There are several Mountains in Cobb County, and with all the Classic South (Civil War) history, I am going stick with Cobb County to finish this Mountains to Classic South theme. Today's Georgia Natural Wonder Gals are Modeling in Marietta.