Atlanta burned in 1864 and rebuilt itself twice over, but the story starts 900 years earlier at the Etowah mounds. Three days run from Mississippian chiefdoms through Sherman's earthworks to the Auburn Avenue blocks where the movement was organised.
Three earthen mounds rise above the Etowah River, raised between 1000 and 1550 AD by Mississippian people; 63ft Mound A held the chief's temple. The museum shows the marble effigy figures dug from the burial mound. Open Tue–Sat 9am–5pm.
Home of The General, the locomotive hijacked by Union raiders in the 1862 Great Locomotive Chase and pursued 87 miles north. A Smithsonian affiliate, with a full reconstruction of the Glover Machine Works foundry floor. Open Mon–Sat 10am–5pm.
Two weeks of fighting in June 1864 stalled Sherman here. Eighteen miles of trail follow original earthworks to the 1,808ft summit, and the visitor centre film maps the frontal assault that cost roughly 3,000 Union casualties in a single morning.
The 1830s courthouse square survived Sherman's burning of the town. A mile southwest, roughly 3,000 Confederate dead from Chickamauga and Kennesaw lie in the 1863 cemetery; the Union dead sit in a separate national cemetery across town.
The 1886 Battle of Atlanta panorama — 49ft tall, 371ft around, hung in a purpose-built drum after a $35m restoration. The same 33-acre campus holds the 1928 Swan House and the 1860 Smith family farm. Open daily from 10am.
Finished in 1889 for $999,000, marginally under budget, and topped in 1958 with gold leaf hauled by wagon from Dahlonega, site of the 1828 gold rush. The rotunda holds the state Hall of Fame busts. Free self-guided entry weekdays 8am–5pm.
The Woolworth lunch-counter simulator pipes the abuse sit-in students absorbed through headphones; most visitors pull them off inside two minutes. Upstairs, King's personal papers rotate in from the Morehouse collection. Open Wed–Sun 10am–5pm.
Forty-eight acres opened in 1850: Margaret Mitchell, golfer Bobby Jones, some 6,900 Civil War dead, and the African American Grounds where Atlanta's Black professional class was buried under segregation law. Grounds free, open until dusk.
Alonzo Herndon was born enslaved in 1858, ran Atlanta's grandest barbershop and founded Atlanta Life Insurance. His 1910 Beaux-Arts mansion above the Atlanta University Center still holds the family's original furnishings and glassware.
Joel Chandler Harris's 1870 Queen Anne cottage, where he wrote the Uncle Remus tales he collected from formerly enslaved storytellers in Putnam County. The guides take the contested legacy head-on rather than around it.
Built in 1929 as a Shriners temple, then saved from the wrecking ball by a public campaign in 1975. The auditorium is a Moorish courtyard with 96 embedded stars and a machine that drifts clouds across the trompe-l'oeil sky.
The 1881 mill drew Appalachian families down into shotgun cottages along Carroll Street, survived a bitter 1914 strike, closed in 1978 and became lofts in 1996. Krog Street Tunnel's murals mark the old rail cut beside it.