Offical site

� � � The hour of 4:30 on the afternoon of Friday, July 22, 1864, is forever preserved on the half-acre canvas of the Atlanta Cyclorama at Grant Park, on Boulevard in southeastern Atlanta. Even more impressive than the better-known Gettysburg Cyclorama, which depicts the acme of Pickett's Charge, this magnificent rendering of the Battle of Atlanta, stands fifty feet tall inside a marble pantheon not far from the actualy scenes portrayed.

� � � The painting was begun in Milwaukee two decades after the battle and was the collective creation of ten German artists who labored for a year and a half to include every possible detail of the action. The best-recognized feature of the painting is the brick, hip-roofed Troup Hurt house, an unfinished structure standing near the Georgia Railroad--a little nearer in the painting than it was actually situated, in fact. Around the house swarm Alabama and South Carolina troops belonging to the brigade of Brigadier General Arthur Manigault, engaged with Midwesterners (mostly from Illinois and Ohio) under Brigadier General Joseph Lightburn. To the right of this, the Mississippians of Colonel Jacob Sharp's brigade can be seen moving against the newly arrived brigade of Colonel Augustus Mersy, whose men also hailed from Illinois and Ohio. Over the carnage soars an eagle, said to represent "Old Abe," the mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteers, which took flight whenever its regiment went into action; if that is the intention, the bird represents a flaw in the painting's accuracy, for Old Abe and the 8th Wisconsin were hundreds of miles to the west, in Mississippi, during the Battle of Atlanta.

� � � Lightburn's Federals fell back in disorder when Manigault's and Sharp's Confederates pierced their line: the Southerners poured through, overrunning two Illinois batteries and rolling up the Union trenches. They threatened to force the Federal XV Corps backward onto the rear of the XVI and XVII Corps, which were already under attack from the front by William Hardee's corps, but General Sherman ordered up additional artillery and John Logan shifted Mersy's fresh brigade from the Union left to help patch the breach. With rallied troops of Lightburn's, Mersy's brigade swept forward to regain their lost works.

� � � It is at this juncture that the action of the cyclorama is frozen. Battery horses lie dead or dying between the lines, killed so the Confederates could not carry away the artillery pieces they had overrun; Southern sharpshooters have taken refuge in the brick house; a cleated tree that served as an impromptu Union signal tower stands abandoned; an ambulance carries away the grievously wounded Union general, Manning Force, who survived a hideous wound to the upper part of his face; soldiers fight hand-to-hand for the entrenchments.

� � � Originally housed under a dome on Edgewood Avenue more than a century ago, the cyclorama was later moved to Grant Park, where it was extensively renovated in the early 1980s.