Beyond these gates lie six acres that have held Atlanta's dead since 1850, when the city set aside this ground as its first permanent burial place. The cemetery contains the graves of approximately 70,000 people across 48 acres, including Confederate and Union soldiers who died in the fighting around Atlanta during William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 campaign, buried in separate sections that reflect the divisions of the war. Margaret Mitchell, who was born in Atlanta in 1900 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for Gone with the Wind — the novel that sold more copies in its first day of publication than any book previously published in the United States — is buried here, her grave consistently one of the most visited in the cemetery.
The grounds also hold the graves of Atlanta mayors, Reconstruction-era Black politicians, prominent Jewish Atlantans in a dedicated section, and golfer Bobby Jones, who won the Grand Slam in 1930. During the siege of Atlanta in the summer of 1864, fighting was visible from the cemetery — Confederate dead were brought here even as the city burned around them. Walking Oakland Cemetery is walking through every era of Atlanta's history simultaneously.