MARIETTA - As of today, the site of the late 19th century Georgia Military Institute will no longer be lost in history.

Local historians are not completely sure when the first marker, unveiled in 1936, was removed, and are unsure where it is now. But today, at 9:45 a.m., those Marietta historians will unveil a new, metal marker at the southeast corner of the Hilton Marietta Hotel and Conference Center parking lot that will again mark the location of the military institute. The ceremony is open to the public.

The GMI was built in 1851 and operated as a military college until Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman burned it down on Nov. 13, 1864, during the Civil War. Located on the site of what is now the Marietta Conference Center and the Marietta Golf Club on Powder Springs Road in Marietta, the GMI was Georgia's first military college and a source of pride for the community, Florrie Corley said.

"The school was patterned after West Point and was often called the 'West Point of the South' as it was a school people drove to get their children in. Local people enrolled there, but other young men came from all over the South to go to school here," said Corley, who is a greeter for the event and host with the Marietta Town Committee of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Georgia. "People forget this was something everyone was very proud of. Boys did parades and did hops and dances, and young people gathered for socials, it was such a fixture in Marietta. This is something that has been left over, a part of our culture and heritage that helped develop our town and is a source of pride that many people have forgotten about. So we felt it certainly deserved to be commemorated."

Dot Dunaway, another greeter and fellow Dame, said the organization studies ancestry as well as historic preservation and historic initiatives.

County spokeswoman Tiffany Lewis said the county paid $2,200 for the plaque through a historical marker program established by the Cobb County Board of Commissioners in 2006. At that time, the board set aside $50,000 to mark historic locations throughout the county. This is the 19th marker erected in the county since the program began four years ago.

Corley said the idea for the GMI marker also began about four years ago, when a fellow Dame, Miriam Elyea Carswell, was speaking to Corley and her husband, Jimmy Corley, about her great-grandfather, Theodore Miller Elyea, who was a GMI cadet and had enlisted for Confederate military service in 1864.

"She just said, 'There should be a marker there.' But my husband said, 'Oh, but there is!' So we drove out there and, sure enough, the marker was gone," Corley said.

So the Dames asked MDJ columnist Bill Kinney to ask around and look into it, but neither he nor city employees could find anything about the marker, though it is believed it was probably removed for a street widening, Corley said.

Carswell then began to spearhead research initiatives to discover more about the GMI and whether the site would be eligible for commemoration. Unfortunately, Carswell passed away on May 26, just before she was able to see her efforts materialize, but many of her family members will attend the ceremony today in her honor.

Wilder Glover Little will unveil the marker this morning, a task he is familiar with. He assisted with the first unveiling 74 years ago almost to the day as a 6-year-old. Little is a descendant of Colonel Arnoldus V. Brumby, the first GMI superintendent. Corley said Brumby Hall, Col. Brumby's home during the Civil War, was likely spared from Sherman's inferno because the two were believed to have been classmates at West Point.

After the unveiling, the public is invited for punch and cookies at Brumby Hall, compliments of the Friends of Brumby Hall, where residents can view a painting of the old GMI campus and gather more information about its history.

"We are just so excited this is finally in place. So many people never even knew it was there, and hopefully having a marker up with a brief history of the GMI will remind people of an important place often forgotten," Corley said.