Grant Park, Atlanta · Track 19 · middle
Federal Square: Where Blue and Grey Share the Shade
Federal Square in Oakland Cemetery (Grant Park, Atlanta) — ~870 Union soldiers buried alongside ~3,000 Confederates. Only major civilian cemetery in the former Confederacy where blue and grey share burial ground. References Margaret Mitchell, Bobby Jones, Maynard Jackson (also buried there), and the 2020 removal of the Lion of Atlanta Confederate monument. Theme: time and the same Atlanta clay dissolving the old enmity.
No audio yet — generation pending.
Lyrics
[Intro] [Verse 1] Eight hundred Union, three thousand grey. Same Atlanta clay holds them up. A wrought iron fence between, but the rain falls the same on every cup. Federal Square. Confederate Mound. The same crows talk in the same trees. The same crows talk in the same trees. [Verse 2] Eighteen sixty-four, the city burned. By eighteen-seventy-something they were laid down. Some POWs that didn't go home. Some boys from Sherman, some boys from town. And the women who tended both rows didn't always know whose bones they were placing. Didn't always know whose bones they were placing. [Chorus] Federal Square, where blue and grey share the shade. Federal Square, where the only flag still flying is the dogwood and the dogwood doesn't know which side won. [Verse 3] Margaret Mitchell walked these paths. Bobby Jones is here. Maynard too. And down in the corner of the city's first dead, the Lion of Atlanta used to look at you. They took the Lion down in twenty-twenty. The square stayed quiet. The square stayed. [Bridge] A hundred and sixty Aprils since the war. Magnolia roots running under the line. What was once two armies is just one cemetery now. Just one cemetery now. [Chorus] Federal Square, where blue and grey share the shade. Federal Square, the south's only private burial ground that says the war is over. [Outro] Same Atlanta clay. Same Atlanta clay. Same Atlanta clay.