Walking Tours Tell Personal Stories About Life in Decatur During the Civil War

By Jack Krost

Curious about Decatur’s role in the Civil War?

It actually was quite significant. Decatur was the staging area for more than 400 wagons that supplied the Union army during General William Tecumseh Sherman’s siege of Atlanta in 1864. A Confederate push into Decatur to capture the wagons met with some initial success but ultimately was unsuccessful.

Now you can learn more about it on walking tours hosted by the DeKalb History Center. The tours start from the lobby on the first floor of the Old Courthouse in Decatur Square and take about an hour. They began last year on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta. And after a pause during the cold month of February, they will resume in March and continue through June 13.

The center is just out with its new spring schedule. It experimented with various days for the tours, but when they resume in March they’ll mostly be on Fridays and Saturdays, when there seems to be the greatest demand for them.

The tours will take place at 2 p.m. on Fridays and 3 p.m. on Saturdays every week except Memorial Day weekend. There will also be a tour on Tuesday, March 17, at 1:30 p.m., and tours will be held Wednesdays at 2 p.m. on March 25, April 22, May 13 and 17 and June 10.

The tours cost $10 for adults, $6 for children aged 6 to 18 and are free for children 5 and under. Six different guides lead the tours on a rotating basis. In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of them. I joined the group in January.

But the tours don’t just focus on what happened in the battle. They aim to bring that time to life by relating the fascinating stories of some of the people who lived in Decatur during the Civil War.

Among them: Mary Gay, whose house was occupied by Union troops and later wrote a biography that’s packed with details about that time, “Life in Dixie During the War.” The book by this fiery defender of the South has become a must read for historians of Decatur’s role in the Civil War. At one point, Mary Gay hid newspapers from the north in her skirt and brought them to Confederate forces by telling Union pickets she wanted to cross the lines to see an ill relative on the other side. She felt that would give the Confederates some useful information. Later, as Confederate forces fled the city, she hid stores of their winter uniforms in her basement – at the risk of being discovered and shot.

Another person is Hiram Williams, who at the age of only 14 became the city’s postmaster when the adult postmaster enlisted in the Confederate army. Young Hiram is credited with doing an admirable job as postmaster, reading letters sent to people who couldn’t read and helping them compose their own letters. Later in life he became a clerk of the Superior Court. And another: Roderick Badger, the son of a slave mother and slave-owning father, who despite his slave roots became skilled in the limited dentistry practiced during that time. He became so skilled that the Atlanta City Council rebuffed an effort by the Atlanta Dentist Association to stop him from practicing.

The tours grew out of an exhibit at the history center about the Civil War. It’s called “Tears and Curses: A Human Perspective on the Civil War” and contains Confederate uniforms, rifles and equipment, a spinning wheel used to cloth as hardships from the Union blockade set in, a pitcher that Union troops took in a raid on the shop of tinsmith Walter Wadsworth, and an original 1893 copy of Mary Gay’s biography, among other artifacts.

“When we were putting together the story of what happened in Decatur during the war, we realized there was still a lot of what we learned that we didn’t use in the exhibit,” said Jenny Goldemund, the programs and preservation coordinator at the history center. So the tours were developed to add to the human story of what happened in Decatur.

To reserve a spot on a tour or find out more about them, call the history center at 404 373-1088, extension 20, or send an e-mail to Jenny Goldemund at: goldemund@dekalbhistory.org. You can also visit the center’s web page, www.dekalbhistory.org, and click links to make reservations via PayPal. But if you decide at the last minute to go on a tour, that’s fine too. You can just show up and pay then.