The Marietta journal. (Marietta, Ga.) 1918-1944, 1919-08-22
COBB COUNTY PAGEANT
A WONDERFUL SUCCESS
Greatest Aggregation of Youth and
Beauty Ever Assembled in
This Section


al weeks, was presented in Marietta
on Tuesday afternoon of this week.
So wonderful was the success Of this
great spectacular outdoor play that
we feel our own inability to improve
upon the story as told by Ward
Greene in The Atlanta Journal, so we
reproduce that below.
Wilder's Meadow, an expanse of
green bottom land and sloping hill
side about mile from Marietta on
the Kennesaw mountain road, was
the setting Tuesday afternoon for a
scene of real and rare beauty.
Here, where half century ago the
grass was spotted with the blood of
north and south and from the woods
on either side spurted flame, yester-
day children romped in ring and
pretty girls, their hair fallen to their
waists and their bright costumes
weathered in garlands, marched and
sang in gay professional.
The battlefield of yesterday was
the playground of today, and old
Kennesaw, whose wooded shoulders
once shook to the thunder Of the guns,
slept silent in the distance while the
sun, sinking behind him, sent long
shadows across the meadow, the girls
and children scattered there, and the
crowd watching on the slope.
Voices on the far side of the field
sang an old hymn, harp and violins
joined family, and it was good to be
there with the smell of the earth so
close, the sky above so open and so
blue, and out in front the children
dancing and the pretty girls and the
costumes like rich rainbow against
the green.
The crowd must have thought so,
for it came by hundreds and by thou
sands and it stayed on into the twi-
light, content all of them to sit on
the hillside, following the spectacle
that was so easy on the eyes, making
friends with out-of-doors.
Of course, it is necessary here to
drag out the program and tell you
that it was all about pageant
THE pageant, in fact, for which Ma
rietta and Cobb county have been
preparing for weeks; that the pageant
was given under the auspices of the
Young Women's Christian Associa-
ton; that it was the first of eleven
community pageants planned for the
whole United States; that this was
the only one the southeast will have !;
and that it represented five states.
1t is necessary, too, to state that
the pageant had a meaning, one Of
those awesome allegorical meanings
which one must refer frequently to
the aforesaid program to decipher;
and that it was full of such charac-
tiers as Progress and the Spirit Of
the Ages and groups representing In
dustry and War and Peace and For
eign Children and so on; and that it
was perfectly done, so that the mean
ing must have been clear to all.
But somehow it seems a pity to
have to hang meaning onto rain
bow or to label fairy with name.
And surely it is no mean compliment
to tell the people Of Cobb county and
the directors of their pageant that,
nameless or meaningless, it would
have been well worth walking all the
way from Atlanta to see just because
it was so beautiful.
You, too, would have felt that way
had you been there, and perhaps you
were, for just about all Cobb county
came, with a goodly number from
Atlanta. In automobiles so many
that they were parked for quarter
of mile along the road, in buggies
with horses hitched to the fence-rail,
on foot they came, and there was
plenty of room for all.
Wilder's Meadow is a natural am
phitheater. On one hillside was the
crowd, extending down to the little
brook at the bottom The meadow
proper was on the other side of the
brook, sloping gradually upward to a
patch of woods cresting the far hill
top.
Before 5 O'Clock, when the pageant
started, the participants were hidden
in the woods, a few of them camou-
tagged by pine bushes that had been
uprooted and replanted again in con-
venient little clumps through the mea-
dow. The central clump was direct
ly opposite the crowd, and in the mid
die Of it, facing them, was stage,
with throne on it for the queen.
Wurm's orchestra sat at the foot
or should it be feet?-of the crowd,
sheltered by a group of trees. A
choir of some forty or fifty voices
was stationed behind the orchestra
and for twenty or thirty minutes be-
fore the start there was singing
''My Old Kentucky Home" "Suwa-
nee Ribber," "Old Black Joe" and
other heart songs of the old south
that everybody knows and that every
body Joined in, so that they swelled
out across the meadow like a camp
meeting chorus.
A blast of bugles heralded the open