I decide I'm going to drive over to the part of the neighborhood the cemetery's in. I could walk it, but it would be a very long walk and it's the kind of summer hot that comes with ninety eight percent humidity and dark thunder clouds that never actually open.
So I drive over there, and I park on a residential street about half a block away. One, the cemetery appears in a bend in the road so sharp that it's almost a U, which doesn't sound like a reasonable place to leave one's car, and two, I have an irrational and totally illogical fear of parking at the Primitive Baptist church itself. What if there's someone inside? What if they want to know what I'm doing? What if the graveyard isn't public property afterall and I'm trespassing? Etc., etc. So I park a little more discreetly and walk over.
I'm rationalizing the whole time that I'm walking. Well, it's daylight. Cemeteries are supposed to be public property, and they're all supposed to be open during daylight hours. If anybody yells at me, I'll just apologize and explain. Everything will be fine. Hey, why is that car slowing down? Who is that guy on the bike? You know how it goes. Every car that slowed down was obviously trying to figure out what I was doing, not, you know, slowing down because there's a super sharp turn ahead, hehe.
I get there, and I'm peering between the links in the fence, and that brings me to my next point of confusion. How does one get...in... to the cemetery? Nowhere along the road front is there an opening in the fence. The fence makes a corner and heads back away from the road, and I don't see a break in it but there's a large grassy knoll to the right. In the distance, I see the train tracks. Am I allowed to go back there? Isn't there some law about not being near the traintracks unless you're at a crossroads? But I decide to play stupid and see what I can find.
Turns out, the entrance to the cemetery is...maybe ten feet, if that, from the train tracks themselves.
See? That fence the vines are growing all over on the left side of the picture is the cemetery fence.
This tag appears directly across from the actual gate into the cemetery. Instructions for the zombie invasion?
(warning: Image heavy. I'm breaking this up into two entries for the sake of your bandwidth.)
It turns out that the cemetery is old. Really, really old. Like... pre Civil war... old. Original Georgia colonists...old.
It's also immediately clear that someone was trying to take care of the place, and just as clear that whoever had been trying to take care of it had run out of funds/otherwise been diverted.
The cemetery is so old that there are literally hundreds of unmarked graves. Whether they were always unmarked, either because they belong to slaves and/or poor whites whose families couldn't afford tomb markers, or because they were buried in haste during the Civil War and there wasn't time to sort the bodies out; or they have become unmarked because the graves are so old that whatever marker there might originally have been has completely crumbled away...it's hard to tell. Some of all of the above, I expect. Regardless, somebody--or several somebodies through the years, it would seem --- has painstakingly tried to identify, at the very least, where there are still human remains.
See all the flags? Each one of those marks an identified grave. At one point, they were using brass markers with numbers on them:
But I guess that project was abandoned:
I wish I could figure out who is maintaining the historical records for this place -- I'm sure that those numbers likely correspond with something. It's curious, though. Beyond a few cursory details, it's almost impossible to find any information on this place online.
Anyway, after the brass number project, I guess they switched to aluminum plates that wouldn't rust.
The one with the name on it is actually at the foot of a grave that does have a headstone, but the writing is so worn that it's hard to read.
There are some graves that don't have any of these markings -- no headstones, no flags, no brass plates, no aluminum tags -- but it looks like they've been marked out nonetheless.
Who were you that you merited a final resting place underneath a tree, marked with a circle of stones, but no name?
Although the unmarked graves outnumber the marked ones, there are several that are marked, as well. I'm going to put them in the next entry, though, so follow along if you're interested.