Atlanta History Museum

At the Atlanta History Museum, we learned the story of desegregation of schools, we explored the history of the civil war, we toured an old Atlanta home, we learned about the 1996 Olympics and we watched a blacksmith make a hook. It was all pretty cool. Here's more on what we learned:

Swan House
Owned by a wealthy businessman, te Swan House is an example of how one prominent family lived during the 1920s and 1930s. Philip Trammel Shutze was the architect for Swan House and its gardens, as well as for many other important buildings in the city. We thought the most interesting rooms were the bathrooms and closets. They were amazingly nice!


The Civil War
The Civil War ravaged America between 1861 and 1865 and changed our country like no other event in history. Over 600,000 people were killed. During the first part of the 1800's the North and the South grew in different ways. In the North, cities were centers of wealth and manufacturing where there were many skilled workers. In the South there was not manufacturing or many skilled workers. Most of the people were farmers. Money came from plantation crops, like cotton, rice, sugar cane and tobacco. Slaves did most of the work on the plantations. Worried about being taken over by the North, some southern states decided to secede. South Carolina was the first to leave the Union and form a new nation called the Confederate States of America. Four months later, six other states seceded: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana. Later Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee joined them. Jefferson Davis was elected as president of the Confederacy. In Charleston, South Carolina there was a Union fort called Fort Sumter. The Union soldiers refused to leave this fort, so the Confederates fired cannons at the fort on April 12, l861. This was the beginning of the Civil War. During the Civil War, Lincoln decided to write the Emancipation Proclamation in secret. He warned the confederate states that they should release their slaves but they did not . On New Years Day, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which freed all slaves. Later that year, on November 19, 1863, President Lincoln gave a speech at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where the Battle of Gettysburg took place. People had gathered at the battlefield to dedicate part of it to the men who had been killed in battle. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is remembered as one of the best speeches ever given. It was short and simple. The war didn't end though until Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House.

The Olympics
The 1996 Olympic Games changed Atlanta forever. For seventeen days, Atlanta was the focus of the entire world. Those seventeen days in 1996 represented a decade's worth of preparation in which Atlanta used no public money and incurred a total cost of $1.8 billion. They had to build roads, buildings, competition sites, and dorm rooms for the Olympics. There were 50,000 volunteers and there were 197 delegations that participated. 13,000 community heroes helped carry the torch to Atlanta. During that time, a bomb planted by Eric Rudolph under park benches exploded in Centennial park, killing 1 and injuring 111 others.