ACHF Publication of the Year for 2010!

Oconee Hill Cemetery
of Athens, Georgia
Volume I
Second Printing Now Available!

by Charlotte Thomas Marshall

xxxvi, 620 pp., hard cover, dust wrapper, illustrations, bibliography, index, 2009,
second printing July 2010. Retail price is $55.00 plus postage and handling. Order now!

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. A second printing of Volume I will be available in mid-July 2010.

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.

The second printing is now available! Order your copy today!