Alta Vista Cemetery & Longstreet Gravesite

General James Longstreet (1821-1904), one of Lee's finest commanders, was born in Augusta and made his last home in Gainesville.  Called by Lee "My Old Warhorse", Longstreet served at First Manassas, Seven Days, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg and was the hero in his native Georgia at Chickamauga.  Severely wounded in the Wilderness, he returned for Petersburg and Appomattox.  President Ulysses Grant, whose wife was Longstreet's cousin, appointed him to a variety of civil jobs, including that of superintendent of revenue and postmaster at Gainesville, where he also ran a hotel, planted a vineyard, and wrote his memoirs, From Manassas to Appomattox.  Following Lee's death, Virginia Generals conspired to blame Longstreet for the defeat at Gettysburg and the subsequent loss of the war.  His real sin, however, was joining the Republican Party, advocating suffrage for blacks, and leading them against a postwar New Orleans insurrection by whites.

Longstreet's grave is in Alta Vista Cemetery at North Avenue and Fourth, off Jesse Jewell Parkway.  A large stone monument, with crossed U.S. and Confederate flags, lists his extensive service for both nations.  Buried beside him is his first wife, Marie Louise, who died here in 1889.  During the war they lost four children to disease.  Longstreet's second wife, Helen Dortch (when they married she was thirty-four, he was seventy six), gained fame during World War II by working in a bomber factory in Marietta at the age of eighty-one.  She died in 1961 in Milledgeville and is buried there.

Also buried here are two Georgia governors who served as Confederate officers.  James Milton Smith was a delegate to the Confederate Congress, and Allen Daniel Candler compiled Georgia's Confederate records.

A small stone monument on Park Hill Drive marks the site of Longstreet's original homeplace and vineyards.  Part of Longstreet's Piedmont Hotel, long thought destroyed, has been identified on Maple Street, and there are plans to restore it.  Woodrow Wilson worked on his doctoral thesis there, and renowned Georgia newsman Henry Grady helped Longstreet write his memoirs.  The Longstreet Society has prepared a tour of six sites associated  with the general, including Helen's house, where the couple probably lived,