Those of you who know me or know me through my writings are aware of my interest in cemeteries. I don't expect most people to share this interest, which I am aware may seem to some as ranging somewhere between eccentric and morbid.
I have a backlog of hundreds of photos of old cemeteries on all ends of the spectrum, from well maintained to hidden and neglected. Recently I started asking friends and relatives who have lived during different time periods in various locations in and around Atlanta to let me know of cemeteries of which I might not be aware. I was particularly interested in hidden or neglected cemeteries.
Johnny O'Neal, a friend who had grown up in East Atlanta and the suburbs to the east of that neighborhood told me of a small cemetery near I-20 east which he describes as having been in a state of extreme neglect even in the 1960s.
The area he described has been in severe economic decline for decades, and the 1950s and 60s commerical sprawl in the vicinity is a ghost town of boarded up convenience stores and empty chain grocery stores.
I searched for it, and had nearly given up, when I decided to give it one last try and walk behind one of the boarded up convenience stores. I found five visible graves. Click here to see the photos. I've included a shot of the abandoned convenience store. There are probably quite a few more graves under the years of overgrowth. Given the small size of the cemetery I suspect that it was a family graveyard attached to a farmhouse. I'm going to make an attempt to research it, but the origin of the cemetery may be hard to determine. At minimum I'll go back with a rake, and try to brush back the overgrowth to determine the years of the first and last marked graves.
A quote is attributed to Benjamin Franklin to the effect that you can tell the character of a people by the state of their cemeteries. By that criterion the verdict on us will be mixed at best.