In Atlanta and Environs, historian Franklin M. Garrett wrote that Oakland Cemetery is "Atlanta's most tangible link between the past and the present." Within its forty-eight acres are more than seventy thousand personal stories--of settlers and immigrants who forged a city from a rowdy railroad camp, former slaves who carved out lives in a segregated world, soldiers in blue and gray who were cut down in a brutal civil war, and civic and business visionaries who rebuilt the Phoenix City from the ashes of war and carried it to prominence on the international stage.

Today,...