Grant Park, where you now walk, is Atlanta's oldest public park, established in 1882 when Lemuel P. Grant, the civil engineer who designed the city's Civil War defenses, donated one hundred acres of his personal estate. Grant had built his fortune as a railroad engineer and land developer, and his gift created a Victorian pleasure ground of winding paths, picnic meadows, and forested hills in what was then the southeastern edge of the city. The park became home to Zoo Atlanta in 1889, making it one of the oldest zoo sites in the United States.
For most of the twentieth century, Grant Park also housed the Cyclorama, a massive circular painting depicting the 1864 Battle of Atlanta — a 360-degree, forty-two-foot-tall artwork created in Milwaukee in 1885 and 1886 by German immigrant artists who interviewed veterans and survivors to ensure its accuracy. The Cyclorama has been relocated to the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead after a major restoration, but its decades in this park made Grant Park a destination for generations of school children who experienced the Battle of Atlanta from inside the painting. The park neighborhood that surrounds it is one of Atlanta's most architecturally intact Victorian districts, with Queen Anne and Folk Victorian houses on streets that still follow the original 1880s plat.