The specific location of Atlanta, originally called Terminus, was determined in the summer of 1840 when engineers of the Macon and Western RR, the Georgia RR, and the Atlantic and Western RR decided where the junction of the their three lines would be. The Chattanooga line was completed in 1850 and by 1860 Atlanta was a rapidly growing city of 10,000 people, the junction point of four railroads, with connections to the north, south, east, and west. Atlanta did not attract the railroads to it, rather the need to connect together separate lines of transportation and communication called the town into being. Neither a manufacturing center or a place of government, with no apparent geographic peculiarity or special natural resources to distinguish it, Atlanta, from the beginning, was the creation of the railroad. The burning of Atlanta is as vivid a part of the American mythic imagination as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, not because of its historical significance, but because of Margaret Mitchell's world renowned historical romance, Gone With the Wind .
People vividly remember the cinematic burning of the city.
They chronicle instead the more destructive firing of the ammunition trains and of foundries by Hood's army as they abandoned the city. For the record's sake, the inhabitants of Atlanta had been expelled long before orders were given to complete the job begun by the Confederate forces. Yet the burning of Atlanta's rail yards and surrounding depots and manufactories, first by the Confederates and later by Sherman, is, nonetheless, richly symbolic in ways that are based on objective fact rather than white Southern nostalgia and resentment. Grant said that Vicksburg was the turning point of the war, after which morale was with the Union. Vicksburg was Grant's victory, and it is natural that he should rate it highly, but he also makes it clear in his Memoirs that Sherman's Atlanta campaign was equally critical.