Described in the book as "the little settlement of Rough and Ready" it was a small town in the state of Georgia that existed during the American Civil War. Jonesboro is about ten miles below the historical Rough and Ready. The town today is called Mountain View.[1]
Georgia Historical Society[]
An historical marker in Rough and Ready (present day Mountain View) states:
A way-station on a stage line from Macon to upper Georgia in the 1840s; Post Office, Apr. 5, 1847 – June 24, 1869. Also, a cotton shipping point — the tavern an eating house for passengers — after the Macon & Western (Central of Georgia) R. R. was constructed in 1846.
After Federal forces left off siege operations on the Atlanta front, Aug. 25, 1864, they moved in a wide swing to the S. To counter this move, Hardee’s A. C. [CSA] was shifted to a line W. of here, between East Point & Thames’ Mill & Gen. Hardee set up a command post at Rough and Ready, 1 P. M. Aug. 30, to observe this latest Federal threat to the M. & W. R. R.[2]
During the Civil War[]
From the author of the book Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood (Mercer University Press, December 2019):
Sherman’s soldiers were marching on a wide, eight-mile front, from Rough and Ready to Jonesboro. With his troops stretched from the Atlanta defenses (where Sherman had kept the XX Corps) Hood didn’t have enough force to cover such a wide expanse.
Actually, it was Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard’s three corps that got near the railroad first, on the evening of August 30, crossing the Flint River and approaching Jonesboro. Hood sent Lt. Gen. Stephen D. Lee’s corps hustling down to help Hardee in an attacking battle that commenced around 3 p.m. on August 31—the same time as Cox’s division had begun to wreck the railroad between Rough and Ready and Quick Station. As McMurry therefore states, in his Atlanta 1864, the battle of Jonesboro “was a useless event”—the railroad had already been cut before Howard’s troops repulsed Hardee’s and Lee’s assault at Jonesboro on the afternoon of August 31.
How Hood got the bad news is itself a neat story.
As a precaution, Hood had already sent the army’s principal ordnance stores to Hardee south of the city. Then, at midday on the 31st, he sent his chief quartermaster, Col. M. B. McMicken, with a train carrying the army’s reserve ordnance (“Col. McMicken has started down the road on engine,” OR, 38.5.1010). According to “Rover,” a reporter in Atlanta (who has yet to be identified), the locomotive got a short distance below Rough & Ready when Confederate cavalry halted it, warning that Yankees were on the track ahead (Augusta Chronicle & Sentinel, September 6). The train chugged back to East Point, and informed the commander there, Brig. Gen. John T. Morgan, that the Macon railroad was cut. Morgan passed on the news to Hood’s headquarters by 5 p.m. (38.5.1008). Thus Hood knew that he would have to abandon Atlanta even before he got word of Hardee and Lee’s repulse—which would not arrive by courier till early in the morning of September 1, as the Federals had cut the telegraph north of Jonesboro.
Rough and Ready (Zachary Taylor’s nickname), by the way, was really just a tavern with a railroad water tank and wood sheds, according to a historical tablet written in the 1950s by the redoubtable Wilbur G. Kurtz. The tavern disappeared in the 1920s; the tablet, once on Georgia Highway 3, is gone, too; and the town of Rough and Ready is now “Mountain View,” a suburb of south Atlanta nothingness.[3]