Little has been done to document the names of the men who died at Kennesaw. Confederate dead are buried in the Marietta Confederate Cemetery south of downtown and across from the campus of the former Georgia Military Institute. Union dead are buried at the Marietta National Cemetery east of the city.

Marietta Confederate Cemetery

This cemetery is the largest Confederate Cemetery south of Richmond. Established in 1863, this was originally the resting place for 20 Confederate soldiers killed in a train wreck north of town. After the Civil War more than 3,000 Confederate soldiers who died elsewhere were recovered and reburied there. By 1902 their wooden markers had deteriorated and many names were lost by that time. They were replaced with plain marble markers. Those names that are known are listed in: Cobb County Georgia Cemeteries, Vol. I, pages 352-361.

Marietta National Cemetery

During the Atlanta Campaign, and later "The March to the Sea," Union and Confederate dead were buried across the fields of Georgia. Henry Greene Cole, a prominent Marietta citizen and owner of Cole's, an inn near the railroad depot, proposed the idea for the Marietta National Cemetery. Also supporting the idea was Dix Fletcher, owner of Fletcher House. Both men were ardent Unionists.

Cole offered a few acres of land near downtown for the cemetery, and the offer was eventually accepted by the federal government. The cemetery was to contain the graves of both Union and Confederate dead. However, Marietta officials did not want Confederate dead to be buried near Yankee dead, so they formed a separate Confederate Cemetery.

Over the next three years Union soldiers from Dalton to Augusta were disinterred and reinterred at the Marietta National Cemetery. These men had been buried with wooden gravemarkers, and by 1869, when the last group was transferred, many of the markers and the names were gone. Over 17,000 men are buried here, more than 3,000 of them unknown. Many of the men died during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and a total of 10,172 died during the Civil War.