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Community Corner

Where Runners (and Maybe Ghosts) Have Room to Roam

The Battleview neighborhood lays "claim" to a 2,900-acre backyard: Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.

Michael Petelle answers the door in shorts and a sweaty long-sleeve T-shirt, apologizes and goes off to change. He has just come back from a four-mile run in his back yard.

Jeez, is that 300 laps around the fence line?

No. Petelle’s back yard is about 2,900 acres. He has plenty of room to stretch his legs.

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Michael and Patricia Petelle, along with two cats and two dogs, live in the Battleview neighborhood next to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. It’s a 1970s neighborhood with houses of all shapes and styles, but the park ties it together.

“The reason we wanted to be next to the park was because I run, and [Patricia] wanted to walk the dogs,” said Michael Petelle, who goes by the nickname "Pic." “It just made sense for us to be next to the park.

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“It seems to me we have some very good runners in this neighborhood. I just wonder if they moved here for the same reason?”

The Petelles moved to Cobb from Asheville, N.C., in the late 1980s, when Pic took the job he still has--teaching science at North Cobb High School. They first rented in Kennesaw.

“We rented for way too long after we moved to the area (2½ years), because we were looking for a house that backed up to the park,” said Patricia, a veterinarian. “Every weekend, it was driving around. I got to know the streets real well where the possibilities were.  I kept an eye on this neighborhood for a long time. It’s kind of the neighborhood I grew up in.”

They moved into Battleview in 1991 and got some unusual history lessons upon arrival.

“Very, very shortly after we moved I was walking in the park, and I had two dogs with me,” Patricia said. “It was twilight. It was after the park was closed. And I started hearing singing.

“I got a little nervous and I thought, OK, I’m going to head back home. About that time a whole troop of Confederate soldiers marched around the corner. I had not been aware of the [Civil War] reenactments at all.  That’s as close to a heart attack as I have ever come.”

A bit later they had another encounter, one that makes a teacher blanch.

“We knew a little bit about the history [of the park],” said Michael, looking at his wife and laughing.  “Remember when we went to that reenactment? There were two young ladies in front of us … you know the story better than I do.”

“They were two young ladies certainly college age,” Patricia continued, laughing along with her husband.  “One of them was asking what was going on, and the other one said she wasn’t quite sure but she thought that the Americans were on the hill and the Redcoats were down in the woods.”

“So, ya,” said Michael. “We knew a little bit about the history in what we learned from that conversation.”

Battleview and the other neighborhoods that snuggle up to the national park are on the main western flank of Marietta’s city limits. The park was designated in 1917; its neighbors came later, and they keep coming. 

The National Park Service reported that more than 1.5 million people visited the battlefield in 2010, a record number.

“It’s amazingly quiet considering the amount of people who are in there,” Patricia said. “We joke about it some time, but you’re not supposed to have fun in that park. It’s supposed to be solemn. So they don’t let you get too rowdy in there.”

The mission of the park is to preserve a Civil War battlefield where more than 5,300 soldiers died during fighting in June and July of 1864.

“[My] brother-in-law won’t come and visit us because he says it’s haunted,” said Patricia with another laugh (the Petelles laugh a lot). “It certainly never bothered me.”

“He’ll visit,” said Michael, “He just won’t spend the night.”

“He gets bad vibes,” said Patricia.

Michael Petelle is on the board of Keep Cobb Beautiful and is a member of Keep Marietta Beautiful and the Marietta Tree Keepers.  Two city projects near his home–a proposed widening of Whitlock Avenue and problems with tree plantings when Marietta High School was built–led him to get involved in local issues.

“Pic’s a professional rabble rouser,” his wife said with a chuckle. “He can’t help himself.”

Marietta’s tree ordinance requires developers to plant a certain number of tree units per acre on a cleared site. A unit is defined by the size of a tree you plant. “We questioned the plan [at the high school] and told them they needed more units,” Michael said.

“They went out and counted the trees and they were told they weren’t qualified to count trees,” Patricia said. “He teaches high school in Cobb County and can’t count trees?”

“You have to measure them, and there’s a chart,” Michael said. “It’s not rocket science.  I could teach third-graders to do it.”

Petelle said the city schools superintendent at the time told them they didn’t know how to count and measure trees, and “actually hired someone to go back and do it after us.  We were right on.”

“It would have been real embarrassing if you all had been way off,” Patricia said.

Four homes at the front entrance to Battleview were actually torn down before plans for the road widening, under heavy public opposition, were abandoned.

Redevelopment battles have quieted in the years since, and so has the rabble rousing. In the meantime, less threatening problems pop up now and then.

The Petelles are one of 13 families in Battleview that work a new community garden, where the redevelopers are four-legged.

“It’s hard to grow thing around here,” Michael said.  “Last year the deer ate in our garden big time, so we’re putting up a fence this year.”

“They are part of the neighborhood,” said Patricia.

The Petelle’s animal kingdom also includes a horse that Patricia boards at a farm next to the park and rides on the trails her husband runs.

“She’s my red sports car convertible,” Patricia says.

“A very slow red sports car convertible,” Michael says.

They both laugh at that one.

 

 

 

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