On July 18, 2013, a construction crew working near Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta pulled something out of the ground that did not belong to the twenty-first century. The object appeared to be a cannonball — and given the location, its probable origin was specific and violent: the 1864 federal siege of Atlanta, when Union forces under General William T. Sherman bombarded the city for weeks before Confederate forces evacuated on September 1.
Police responded to the construction site and transported the artifact to a bomb range for examination. Bomb technicians confirmed the object "may have been from the Civil War era," though expert examination had not yet established a definitive identification at the time of the report. The Georgia World Congress Center Authority, which owns the park and surrounding land, removed the item from the property.
The Siege of Atlanta
During the summer of 1864, Union forces surrounded Atlanta from the north, east, and west, cutting the railroad supply lines that made the city a strategic prize. When direct assaults failed to dislodge Confederate defenders, Sherman ordered a sustained bombardment. Federal artillery fired thousands of cannon shells into the downtown area — the same blocks where Centennial Olympic Park, the Georgia World Congress Center, and the surrounding hotels and attractions now stand.
The bombardment was indiscriminate. Military targets and civilian neighborhoods received the same treatment. Homes, businesses, and churches were struck. Residents who remained in the city sheltered in basements and improvised bunkers. The shells that did not explode on impact buried themselves in the ground, where some remained undiscovered for a century and a half.
What Lies Beneath Downtown
The 2013 discovery was not unprecedented. Construction projects in downtown Atlanta have periodically unearthed Civil War-era artifacts — shell fragments, bullets, building foundations, and other remnants of the city that existed before Sherman's forces destroyed much of it during the occupation and subsequent March to the Sea. The ground beneath downtown Atlanta is, in a literal sense, layered with the city's history: the railroad town that preceded the war, the destruction of 1864, the reconstruction that followed, and the successive waves of development that built the modern city on top of the old one.
That a Civil War cannonball was found within yards of Centennial Olympic Park — a site built in 1996 to celebrate international athletic competition and peace — captures the compressed timescale of Atlanta's history. The city was burned 132 years before the Olympic torch was lit in the same district. The cannonball, buried and forgotten, connected the two moments in the most direct way possible.
The artifact's ultimate disposition — whether it went to a museum, a historical society, or a storage facility — was not determined at the time of reporting. But its existence confirmed what every construction crew working in downtown Atlanta already knows: the ground has stories that the blueprints don't show.
Original reporting by Georgia Public Broadcasting, July 19, 2013.