The Battle of Pickett's Mill is not well known, even to many Georgians or to all Civil War buffs. But it was fought practically in our own backyard. Moreover, the fields and forest where it was fought are well preserved and deserve to remain that way.

Unfortunately, however, The Civil War Preservation Trust, based in Washington, D.C., has placed that battlefield on its annual list of the 10 battlefields most threatened by development or neglect. That list is designed to call attention to threats the Trust describes as "tangible links to our shared history."

Other sites on the list include:

* Gettysburg, where a large casino is proposed a half-mile outside the park's boundaries;

* The Wilderness (in Virginia), where Wal-Mart is trying to build a Supercenter just yards from where the battle began;

* Fort Stevens (Washington, D.C.), where President Lincoln looked over the parapet to watch charging Confederates under Gen. Jubal Early;

* And Cedar Creek (in Virginia's picturesque Shenandoah Valley), where a proposed mine expansion would chew up 400 acres of unprotected battlefield land.

The Pickett's Mill battle took place just inside Paulding County from west Cobb after the Union Army of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman began angling back toward the W&A Railroad line (today's CSX) and Marietta after trying unsuccessfully to go around the left of the Confederate Army in Paulding County. Sherman butted into Confederates under Gen. Patrick Cleburne at Pickett's Mill on May 27, 1864 and got the worst of it, losing 1,600 men to the Rebels' 500. The two armies would meet again the next month at Kennesaw Mountain, and Sherman got the worst end of that deal, too.

The 765-acre site is now a park, thanks largely to the efforts of two Cobb residents: late Cobb Board of Commissioners Chairman Phil Secrist, who was a college history professor and relic hunter; and local attorney Fred Bentley. Upon learning in 1971 that a timber company planned to sell the battle site to a developer, they and three other men bought the site to protect it. They then helped persuade the state to buy it for use as a park.

Unfortunately, the state has severely cut visitation hours and staffing levels at Pickett Mill, and there is even talk now of selling it because of the budget crunch, according to Bentley.

"If that's true, then I'd love to have somebody's head because we worked too hard to save it in the first place and, number two, the state worked too hard to keep it like it was, and it's preserved just like it was at the time of the battle," Bentley told the MDJ last week. "Sell the Capitol. It's less important. (Selling the park) is the most asinine thing I have ever heard, because of all the sites that we've had in this area, that one is the most perfectly preserved and the most important in that sense than any other site we have, including Kennesaw Mountain because it's preserved better than the Kennesaw Mountain battle site."

Trust spokeswoman Mary Koik explains that Pickett's Mill was not placed on the list because of rumors that it might be sold, but because of reduced state funding, the public doesn't have the opportunity to visit it that it did in the past.

As MDJ reader Carolyn Bourque commented about the story on the MDJ website: "Books are wonderful to read, especially about our history, but until one walks the same preserved grounds and feels the aroused emotions of being in the same place where our history took place, we are missing so much. We need to see, feel and know about our past and our ancestors."

True enough. And Bentley is correct that the Pickett's Mill battlefield is much less trammeled by encroachment from the modern world than the Kennesaw Mountain park - or nearly any other Civil War battle park, for that matter. As such, it deserves every bit of protection the state and local governments can give it.