Only the Voiceless Speak Forever

Clayton Ramsey
Nov 1 · 12 min read

Originally published in Georgia Backroads, Vol. 18, №2, Summer 2019

by Clayton H. Ramsey

To honor the dead is a fundamentally human and ancient impulse. How this is done has changed over the ages. Funerary history is economic, social, artistic, and religious history, as vast and diverse as the cultures it expresses. As such, the history of Georgia cemeteries is nothing less than the history of Georgia’s peoples, reflecting where they came from, how they lived, what they believed, how they died, and how they would be remembered.

The spaces our ancestors set aside for the dead and the arti- facts they left as reminders to the living reveal the means and aspirations of Georgians who lived in particular circumstances. Added together, they form our shared past. Stones and plots tell a tale, from the shortest epitaph to the largest cemetery, and the study of these remains not only illuminates our predecessors’ lives, it also frames our own with historical context.

The Native Americans of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture left the first visible evidence of their burial practices in the form of the mounds of Etowah, near what is now Cartersville. Built between 1000 and 1550 AD, these mounds predated the introduction of European settlements by centuries. Once topped by public buildings, temples, and priestly residences, three platform and three smaller mounds comprise the complex. The 63-foot tall temple Mound A towered over the 54-acre town of ceremonial plazas and primitive homes. The mounds of earth, human remains, and burial artifacts are all that endure from this culture. The excavation of Mound C and further study of the site has opened a world that would not have been accessible without the existence of these millennium-old burial mounds.

When General James Oglethorpe founded the British colony of Georgia in February of 1733, he first settled where the Savannah River emptied into the sea. As a result, the city of Savannah has the oldest identified European burial grounds in the state. The old Colonial Cemetery (renamed Colonial Park Cemetery in 1896) was founded in 1750 as the burial ground for the Anglican Christ Church Parish. Forty-two Jewish settlers, who arrived in the colony on the schooner William and Sarah in July 1733, soon established their own graveyard on South Broad Street, then after 1773 at the Old Jewish Burial Ground near Cohen Street. There was an Old Negro Cemetery for the interment of African Americans within the city.

By 1789, Colonial Cemetery was enlarged for all denomi- nations as the demographic composition of residents continued to change with a constant stream of immigrants from the Old World. Marked with wooden slats, local sandstone or limestone, and some imported slate, these early graves followed some of the conventions of those who preceded them in the Northeast. Diana Williams Combs (1986) demonstrated that of the six extant 18th-century iconic gravestones in Colonial Cemetery, the supposed carvers were from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and all had the emblems prevalent in the older colonies, like the winged soul and hourglass, and later the urn.

Of course, not all new colonists remained on the coast; many moved inland, and some pushed even further west. For those migrating, deaths by disease, Indian attack, accident, and wild animals necessitated frontier burials. If marked at all, the graves were often lost, the locations rarely recorded.

Settlement, however, usually resulted in the establishment of recognized plots for burials. Farms and plantations, separated from central communities, had family gravesites on their property. The owners would have stone markers that reflected their station, based on what was available. These family lots were well tended and lasted for generations. If they were slave owners, there was usually provision for their slaves. Their slaves were buried in a separate, unused part of the property in night- time ceremonies. Shells, wooden or stone slabs, face jugs, or even particular plants marked the graves. Once the oral history of these plots was lost, so was the memory of many of these enslaved peoples.

Georgia communities did not have the public commons or central meetinghouses of the first colonies, but they did have churches, and many of these churches, following ancient Christian tradition, had adjacent graveyards. Sometimes these even predated the construction of the church as communal burial grounds. If the church was built first, the graves were usually those of congregants and were thus denominationally homogenous. If a communal site, then there might be the possibility of some diversity, reflecting the composition of the community, although there was still strict segregation based on race, if not religious affiliation.

Conventions associated with what D. Gregory Jeane (1992) has called the “Upland South Folk Cemetery” in the northwest part of the state developed with the movement of German and Scotch-Irish immigrants. Identified by scraped, mounded graves in a traditional east-west orientation on hilltops, they had distinctive decorations, plantings, and grave-shelters, and were attended by devoted “cults of piety.” As the demographics of the state changed, so did their funeral practices. Country of origin influenced burial traditions, as did urban or rural, slave or free, rich or poor. These distinctions in life affected their committal in death.

By the early years of the 19th century, the major urban cen- ters of the eastern seaboard were beginning to experience a crisis in how they buried their citizens. Overcrowded churchyards (and underground church vaults) and public health emergencies like yellow fever epidemics, blamed in part on the “miasma,” or airborne contamination, of decomposing bodies, prompted city authorities to search for alternatives to in-town burials.

Following the example of the “garden cemetery” of Père Lachaise in Paris, Dr. Jacob Bigelow and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society started the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1831, and thus initiated the influential “rural cemetery” movement. Moved outside the city center, Mount Auburn joined the philosophy of Romanticism with the design of 18th-century English landscape gardens. The first to use the word “cemetery” to describe what they offered, theirs would be a “garden of graves,” literally a collection of “sleeping chambers” in which the dead would repose in picturesque beauty until the Resurrection. With their planned horticulture, circuitous roadways, and bodies of water in lovely vistas, they marked a return to nature and a certain optimism about the afterlife that moved past the frenetic pace of city life and gloominess of strict Calvinism. Here, grieving survivors could come to heal and reflect in a natural setting.

Family plots were offered, and they were given the chance to choose monuments to honor their departed relatives. In a return to the glory of classical Greece and Rome, they used the lighter, more durable materials of marble and granite for headstones and statuary. Iron fences surrounded family graves. Monuments became increasingly more elaborate and embel- lished. Here, before the emergence of city parks, the public could come for refreshment and diversion, and they did so in growing and more unruly numbers. Tours were organized, guidebooks were printed, and rules of conduct expected on visits were posted.

In Georgia, Rose Hill in Macon (1840) and Laurel Grove in Savannah (1850) were established according to the same principles that characterized cemeteries like Mount Auburn. Perhaps the most striking example of a Georgia cemetery illustrating this rural movement is Oakland (originally “Atlanta”) Cemetery. Atlanta was no Boston or New York — in 1850 the population was only 2,572 — but officials nevertheless chose a six-acre swath of land one mile from the city center to serve as a “rural” cemetery. By 1867 it had grown to 48 acres, and there are now more than 70,000 graves on the property. Interments continue at a rate of fifteen every year, even though the last plot was sold in 1884. In addition to the general burial area, there were separate sections for Civil War soldiers, African Americans, Jews, and the indigent. Monuments, obelisks, statues, and a variety of headstones dotted the idyllic landscape. They reflected trends in funerary art and demonstrated the prestige and financial means of the deceased.

By the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, there were 66 of these garden, or rural, cemeteries in the United States. But the Civil War, which produced 620,000 casualties, created an enormous need for burial space. Usually soldiers were buried where they fell or at military posts, but the sheer number of deaths prompted an alternative protocol. In July 1862, Congress approved the purchase of land for national cemeteries for the interment of Union soldiers. Confederate dead, of course, did not have federal support. A few dozen soldiers killed in a train wreck in 1863 formed the core of the Marietta Confederate Cemetery just north of Atlanta, to be filled later with military casualties from area hospitals and the Chickamauga (1863) and Atlanta (1864) Campaigns. Union dead from the Battle of Atlanta would be interred in the separate Marietta National Cemetery. Toward the end of the war, 13,000 Union POWs from the infamous Andersonville Prison Camp were interred in the national cemetery on site, now maintained by the National Park Service. Opposed in battle, separate in death.

With the development of the technology of “arterial embalming” by Dr. Thomas Holmes just before the war, bodies could more easily be preserved and shipped back to local or family cemeteries. After Appomattox, however, there was a drive to give the soldiers that were hastily interred in battlefield graves a more permanent and honorable resting place. The wooden headboards that had marked veteran graves for years were replaced in 1873 with more durable and uniform marble markers. The grave number, name, state, and rank of the deceased were inset in a federal shield, now recognized as the “Civil War”-style marker. Identical markers were not only easier to manufacture, they also reinforced the democratic ideal of equality in arms. Six years later, these markers were made available for the unmarked graves of Union soldiers in private cemeteries.

It would be years before the federal government acknowledged Confederate graves. In 1906, Confederate prisoners of war buried in federal cemeteries were marked, though without a shield and with a pointed top, rather than the rounded ones of Union markers. By 1929 Confederate markers for graves in private cemeteries were offered and the next year the Confederate “Cross of Honor” was authorized for use on markers. Aside from the cemeteries devoted to Confederate veterans, like the one in Marietta, there were other cemeteries, like Oakland, that had sections devoted to the revered dead of the CSA. Many more were buried in family plots, churchyards, and municipal cemeteries across the state. Heritage organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy have made sure that these graves are marked and honored. 120,000 Georgians fought for the Confederacy, and between 11,000 and 25,000 of them were killed in action. Added to civilian deaths and Union causalities of battles fought in Georgia, the number of Civil War graves in the state is substantial. Recovery from this trauma was slow. The Georgia economy had been blasted by the war, and these material conditions affected the way the dead were laid to rest. Then more than ever, the South was dependent on the more industrial regions that had not been as severely distressed. In a speech to the Bay State Club of Boston in 1889, Henry Grady, chief proponent of the “New South,” spoke about a funeral service he had attended in Pickens County. “The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral,” he said, “but the corpse and the hole in the ground.” Grady was trying to jumpstart a devastated economy, but his observation was not strictly applicable to the entire state; marble was discovered in Pickens County in the 1830s and granite was known for years to be a natural resource in the Piedmont region of northeast Georgia near Elberton. Both were used in Georgia cemeteries.

Grady was right, however, in that most of the granite still came from Michigan or New Hampshire and the best marble came from Vermont. Stones could be ordered directly from companies like the Vermont Marble Company or later by mail order catalogs like the Excelsior Statuary Book (1895), or retail outlets like Sears, Roebuck (1902). With the establishment of the Georgia Marble Company in 1884 and the Swift and Wilcox granite quarry in 1889, however, the tide was turning. Building a distribution network that took advantage of the growing system of railroads that crossed the state, these enter- prises ensured that Georgia was becoming less dependent on the resources of others to meet the needs of its citizens, funerary or otherwise, and more a full contributor to the national economy.

In 1855, the accomplished landscape architect Adolph Strauch was hired to develop the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. The garden cemeteries had become too wild, he believed, the monuments too numerous, the space too overrun with people, fences, and statues. He wanted to bring an artistic order to these places. With professional supervision and streamlined efficiency, and influenced by the City Beautiful movement, Strauch offered tasteful elegance, and advertised it. The so-called “lawn park” or “landscape lawn” cemeteries began to proliferate. Georgia had to survive the war and Reconstruction before it was in a position to follow this national trend. Atlanta’s Westview Cemetery opened in 1884 in response. With its prominent mausoleum and ordered rows of subdued monuments, Westview represented a new stage in the evolution of Georgia cemeteries, in many ways the beginning of a more professional and commercial funeral industry.

Memorial parks were the next development in burial practice. Hubert Eaton assumed management of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in 1917. He brought in the work of professional artists and managers. He introduced flat markers to aid in lawn maintenance and remove the distractions of upright monuments. Forest Lawn had an on-site mortuary, floral shop, and chapel, one-stop shopping, as it were, for the modern funeral customer, all for the affordable cost of pay-as-you-go or pre-need payment plans. He believed in a “happy eternal life,” not burdened by the maudlin sentimentalism of earlier cemeteries, represented most prominently, he thought, by the elaborate embellishments of the Victorian era. Here “joyful religion and united and patriotic community” would meet, with nature in the background, uncluttered by the mawkish works of man. This was a modern arrangement for modern people who had been entrusted at end of life to funeral professionals. It was perpetual real estate for a blissful eternity. Arlington Memorial Park in Sandy Springs interred its first occupant in 1922, consistent with the philosophy developed by Eaton. Most modern cemeteries follow his example.

There are those who now choose separate cemeteries, like the Catholic diocese and Atlanta Mosque Islamic cemeteries, a self-selected segregation based no longer on law or prejudice, but on the decision of certain ethnic or religious groups to join in death those with whom they associated in life.

But there are others who are so profoundly marginalized that their deaths, as their lives, are not fully acknowledged. There were an estimated 25,000 mentally ill residents of the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville who were buried in mass graves on the property since its founding as an asylum in 1842. A restoration project in 1997 placed 2,000 numbered iron markers in Cedar Lane Cemetery near the hospital as a memorial to those who suffered and died there.

There are others, of course, whose lives and deaths were a matter of state responsibility. The Georgia State Prison Cemetery in Reidsville receives most prisoners whose bodies are not claimed by family members.

Pauper’s Cemeteries are also the final resting place of the dispossessed. Also known as Potter’s Fields after the burial ground bought with Judas’s blood money by Jerusalem priests for strangers (Matthew 27:7), they are unwanted tracts of land the state designates for those who cannot afford burial in more traditional cemeteries. Lakeside Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Palmetto is one such property, the end of the line for the poorest residents of Fulton County. The county, which buries some 300 indigent persons every year here, does not pay for markers, so only a frac- tion of the graves are marked with small metal plaques. With grassy sections among patches of red clay it is a world away from the lush memorial gardens of the suburbs. Pushed aside in life, these souls, no less human for being without financial means, enter eternity from the periphery, acknowledged only by a county chaplain or a per- haps a grieving relative.

Though not human, pets are just as much a part of our families and have need of burial at the end of their lives, as well. Founded in 1896 in Hartsdale, New York, just north of Manhattan, the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery was the first such cemetery. It now holds the remains of 70,000 pets, as one of an estimated 700 pet cemeteries across the country. Pet Heaven, now known as the Atlanta Pet Cemetery, was started in 1942, the first in the state, as a way to preserve the memory of our loyal animal friends.

Georgia has churchyards, family plots, public memorial gardens, and private cemeteries across the state. Every cemetery tells a story. Epitaphs and symbols still speak. Every marker’s placement, style, and material composition also has something to say. Together in graveyards, groupings and changes in design can be seen, and add to the story. Studied over time, a narrative emerges. Current trends like cremation and green cemeteries remind us that the story is not over; we continue to rethink the way we honor the departed.

If we are to know our history and our future, we must lis- ten to the voices frozen in the monuments of cemeteries. Even the unmarked and forgotten have something to share. For in this chorus of storytellers, we find our place as Georgians and as human beings.

Clayton H. Ramsey is a freelance writer and former president of the Atlanta Writers Club. He lives in Decatur. For more information about (and photography of ) Georgia’s historic rural churches, visit www.hrcga.org

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