Oconee Hill Cemetery
of Athens, Georgia
Volume I
by Charlotte Thomas Marshall
xxxvi, 620 pp., hard cover, dust wrapper, illustrations,
bibliography, index, 2009
Retail price is $55.00 plus $5.50 postage and handling.
The Athens Historical Society is pleased to
announce the long-awaited publication of the first volume of its annotated
edition of Oconee Hill Cemetery interments. Volume I is a greatly expanded
version of its 1971 publication and covers the same sections of the cemetery as
that book. Volumes II and III are already in progress and will cover all of the
sections which have opened on the other side of the North Oconee River since
January 1900.
[NOTE: We are now collecting family
information for the next volume! If you have family buried in Oconee Hill, we
hope you will share your research with us!
Please email us!]
This book, the first of three proposed volumes about the cemetery, is the Athens
Historical Society's 50th Anniversary publication. Oconee Hill Cemetery records
became a project of the Society in 1963, resulting in the publication of
tombstone inscriptions for the old part of the cemetery in 1971. One of the
purposes of that book was to compile a list which would partially replace the
first forty years of cemetery records which were lost to fire in 1896.
The present book, which contains information about 3,900 burials, is an update
and vast expansion of that work, including maker's marks from monuments, data
from the sexton's Record of Interments (beginning in 1897), abstracts of
obituaries, and biographical data from other sources. There are notations
linking families from lot to lot and section to section. Similar information
about people buried in unmarked graves is included.
Each section of the oldest part of this Victorian natural landscape cemetery,
established by the City of Athens in 1856, is detailed in the order the sections
opened: West Hill, East Hill, Paupers Burying Ground, Colored Burying Ground,
Valley, River Road and North Slope. And full information about two contiguous
cemeteries, Factory Burial Ground and Congregation Children of Israel Cemetery,
follows.
Additional materials included in this volume
The appendices include lists of trustees and
sextons, a chronology of the cemetery's history, newspaper abstracts, and an
article about the cemetery from the 1997 Athens Historian. More than
9,300 names are included in the index.
The illustrations range from 1856 newspaper ads for
caskets and an 1859 deed signed by Thomas R. R. Cobb, first chairman of
the Board of Trustees of the cemetery, to maps, aerial views,
vintage photographs and documents from the Bisson Family Collection, and
numerous images of monuments and cemetery scenes photographed between 1980 and
2009 by Kenneth Storey, Lori Clifton Conway, Mark Costantino, Harry Yates,
Colleen Kelly and Kenneth Kay.
The Athens Historical Society is very grateful to the R. J. Taylor, Jr.
Foundation for its generous grant to defray printing costs of this volume.
 About
the Author
The book is the work of Charlotte Thomas
Marshall, one of many Athenians who collect and preserve local history and
joyously share it with all who are interested. This volume is the repository of
much of the knowledge that she has acquired in nearly 40 years of researching
19th-century Athens.
In 1971 she edited the Society's first book about
Oconee Hill Cemetery. After researching the origins of First Baptist Church in
connection with its sesquicentennial, she wrote Glimpses Into the Antebellum
History of the First Baptist Church, Athens, Georgia in 1981. Historic
Houses of Athens followed in 1987. With her husband she edited Susan Frances
Barrow Tate's Remembering Athens for the Society in 1996. She was a
contributor to Gary L. Doster's A Postcard History of Athens, Georgia in
2002. And in 2007 she assisted Ruth Roberson Hughes in preparing The History
and People of St. Luke A. M. E. Church. In 2008 the Georgia Genealogical
Society recognized her for outstanding contributions to the field of genealogy.
Charlotte was the first woman to serve as a trustee
of Oconee Hill Cemetery. She and her husband, George, are former presidents of
the Athens Historical Society and both are charter members of Friends of Oconee
Hill Cemetery.
How to order
The book is now available by mail from the Society, or at
these Athens locations: ADD Drug Store in Five Points, the Athens Welcome Center,
Aurum Studios, and Borders at Beechwood.
Retail price is $55.00 plus $5.50 postage and handling. Use the handy order
form to place your order today!
 |
