Captain Peter Simonson, 5th Indiana Battery
Cobb County, Cobb County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
Captain Peter Simonson 5th Indiana Battery. Acting chief of artillery for the 1st Division (4th Army Corps), Simonson on June 16, 1864 was busy entrenching here a 4-gun battery of artillery when he was killed by a Confederate bullet. The Confederate was perhaps a sharpshooter armed with an English made rifle with scope known as a Whitworth. The Whitworth fired a six-sided bullet that could kill a target one-half mile away. However, the two armies were within a few hundred feet of each other at this point, so it is not unreasonable to believe he could have been killed by a common Confederate rifleman.
Erected by Cobb County, GA
The Story
During the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Union and Confederate armies grappled across the hills of north Georgia in a series of grinding engagements. Captain Peter Simonson, an Indiana artillery officer serving as a division chief of artillery, was entrenching a battery here on June 16, 1864 when a Confederate marksman killed him.
Why it matters
Simonson's death marks the close, deadly fighting of Sherman's advance on Atlanta, a campaign that helped decide the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the summer of 1864, the Civil War had entered its most relentless phase. In the West, Union armies under William T. Sherman had pushed out of Chattanooga and were grinding southward toward Atlanta, one of the last great manufacturing and rail hubs of the Confederacy. The country here in the hills of north Georgia — the ridges and creek bottoms of what is now Cobb County — became a chessboard of trenches, earthworks, and sudden, close-range violence.
This was not the war of grand open-field charges people often picture. By 1864 both armies had learned, the hard way, to dig. Soldiers threw up breastworks wherever they halted, and artillery was hauled into position and entrenched under fire. The two sides often faced each other across only a few hundred feet of scarred ground, close enough to hear one another and close enough to kill with a single well-aimed shot.
Into this landscape came thousands of men from far-off states, among them the gunners of Indiana. Artillery officers like the one remembered here were the technicians of the battlefield — responsible for placing heavy guns where they could do the most good and survive the longest. It was demanding, exposed work, and it put them exactly where the enemy most wanted to shoot.
People & events
The marker honors Captain Peter Simonson of the 5th Indiana Battery, who on June 16, 1864 was serving as acting chief of artillery for the 1st Division of the 4th Army Corps. That role meant he was not simply firing a gun but directing where the division's cannon would go — riding the line, judging the ground, and personally overseeing the placement of batteries.
On that day he was entrenching a four-gun battery on this very ground when a Confederate bullet found him and killed him. The inscription weighs a haunting possibility: that the fatal shot came from a sharpshooter armed with a British-made Whitworth rifle, a precision weapon with a telescopic sight that fired a distinctive six-sided bullet and could strike a man half a mile away.
Yet the marker is honest about uncertainty, and that honesty is worth pausing on. Because the lines here stood only a few hundred feet apart, an ordinary Confederate infantryman with an ordinary rifle could just as easily have killed him. We may never know whose finger was on the trigger. What we do know is that an officer directing the placement of guns was among the most exposed men on the field, and that exposure cost Simonson his life.
Its place in the American story
Simonson's death is a single thread in the enormous fabric of the Atlanta Campaign — but it is the kind of thread the whole cloth is woven from. Sherman's advance on Atlanta was one of the pivotal military efforts of the war. The eventual fall of the city in September 1864 lifted Northern morale, strengthened Abraham Lincoln's re-election prospects, and helped seal the Confederacy's fate.
That outcome was purchased not in one dramatic stroke but in hundreds of small, deadly engagements like the one that killed this Indiana captain. Every ridge had to be flanked, every battery placed, every trench line contested. The campaign's grinding character — the entrenching, the sharpshooting, the constant lethal pressure — foreshadowed the trench warfare that would define conflicts decades later.
Simonson also reminds us how far the war reached. A man from Indiana died on a Georgia hillside for a cause fought out a thousand miles from home. Multiply his story by the tens of thousands, and you begin to grasp the true scale of what the nation paid to hold itself together.
If you visit
Stand here and the first thing to appreciate is the ground itself. This is Memorial terrain marking a specific, documented spot — the place where a battery was being dug in and where an officer fell. Read the landscape: notice how the hills rise and fold, and imagine trenches scratched into these slopes with the enemy startlingly close.
Let the marker's careful wording sink in. It does something unusual and admirable — it tells you what is known and openly admits what is not. There is real historical humility in the phrase that concedes an ordinary rifleman may have been responsible rather than a legendary sharpshooter. That candor is part of what makes this a trustworthy stop.
If you are tracing the Atlanta Campaign across north Georgia on a road trip, this memorial fits naturally into that larger route of ridges and battlefields north and west of the city. Give yourself a quiet minute here. It marks not a famous general but a working officer doing dangerous, essential labor — and the very ordinariness of his death is what makes it worth remembering.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Plan your visit
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Attractions
- Sweet Eloise8.9 mi away
- Vape Ape13.5 mi away
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Related people
- · Peter Simonson
Related events
- · Atlanta Campaign
Themes & tags
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