The Marietta Confederate Cemetery, a short walk from the square, holds the remains of more than 3,000 Confederate soldiers who died during the Atlanta Campaign of 1864. Many were casualties of the fighting at Kennesaw Mountain and the broader series of engagements as Sherman pressed south toward Atlanta. The graves are arranged by state of origin, with separate sections for Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and other Confederate states.
Adjacent to the Confederate Cemetery is the Marietta National Cemetery, established in 1866 for Union dead, which holds over 10,000 graves. Having both cemeteries within a few hundred yards of each other — neither large enough to be grand, both large enough to be sobering — gives a concrete sense of the scale of the campaign that swept through this county in the summer of 1864.