Marietta in History
The First Settlers' Parade
September 27, 1933
The country was deep in the Great Depression when Marietta and Cobb County paused to review the first one hundred years. Merchants around the Square filled their store windows with artifacts of those early days. People moved from window to window surveying a mosaic of history composed of portraits, farming tools, clothes, guns, documents, china, and jewelry. At 2 p.m. they lined the streets as a parade began.
The covered wagons, ox carts, livestock, dogs and children brought the first brave settlers back to life. A Cherokee Indian rode with his son on the beginning of the long, sad trail West. Log schoolhouses and homes, church campgrounds, railway passengers, uniformed cadets and hoop-skirted girls were remembered. Years of war and devastation, the return of Confederate soldiers to a ravaged homeland, patient reconstruction – all passed before their eyes. More recent times were represented by one of the earliest automobiles, a courting couple on a bicycle and soldiers going off to yet another war.
The price of cotton was 4 ¾ cents that day as Marietta paused to remember its history. At the fairgrounds, a white-haired daughter of a pioneer and a great-great-great granddaughter of another cut the birthday cake as people sang "Auld Lang Syne" and "Home, Sweet Home."
Sarah Blackwell Gober Temple writes in The First Hundred Years, "Cobb County people had reviewed their history for the first hundred years. If, here and there, there were tears, they were no less caused by memories of those now dead who had helped to make that history, memories of stories told about them which for the first time became to the young a reality, than by that spiritual meekness with which in considering history we inherit, not the earth, but the past."
Temple, Sarah Blackwell Gober. The First Hundred Years.