New Life for the Old Athens Cemetery

Nearing Its 200th Year, the Aging City Burial Ground Sees Slow But Sure Improvements

originally published January 23, 2008

Nearly two centuries after receiving its first burial, the Old Athens Cemetery - a quiet little two-and-a-half acre corner of UGA’s North Campus - is now receiving the kind of hands-on love and care that it has gone without for many years. Historic preservationist Janine Duncan of the UGA Grounds Department is in the first year of coordinating a five-year project to preserve the cemetery as it stands today. Sadly, because of periodic vandalism in recent years, one of the first steps of the project was to tag and catalogue the many loose pieces of stone and ironwork in the graveyard - “anything that could walk,” in the words of Grounds Department Director Dexter Adams - and put those items into secure storage. Gradually, though, the pieces are coming back.

“To me,” Duncan says, “this is an evocative cross-section of, just, Athens history as a whole, because you’ve got people, families that you know were affected by the yellow fever outbreaks or the flu outbreaks. You have - there are at least three Revolutionary War soldiers here. There are two Civil War soldiers. There are four to five Revolutionary War spouses.”

When it opened around 1810, the cemetery served a tiny but growing town that extended from the North Oconee River near Oconee Street to what’s now downtown. It sits on land that was originally part of the University’s land grant from the state legislature, and the school apparently donated it to the city of Athens, though Duncan says there’s no official record of the transaction. She has read minutes of a meeting of UGA’s trustees in the 1840s, reporting that the cemetery was crowded, and says that by 1850 it was completely full. The Oconee Hill Cemetery, across what’s now East Campus Road, opened later that decade.

“When Oconee Hill was opened, this one was no longer the official city cemetery, but nobody - if you still had a spouse or a loved one here - nobody raised a fuss if you buried somebody here,” Duncan explains. “So, the earliest located marker to date is 1814; the latest one is 1898.” Still, after the mid-1850s, the burial ground was caught in a catch-22: the University didn’t own it, and hence wouldn’t spend state funds on its upkeep; the city of Athens, meanwhile, took the position that it wasn’t willing to maintain an abandoned cemetery. Eventually, citizens formed the organization known as the Friends of the Old Athens Cemetery; in 2004, that group deeded the cemetery back to UGA, opening the door for the improvements that now, albeit on a tight budget, are being made.

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“Things just show up, I think, when they want to show up,” Duncan says, smiling. Example: with dumb luck and a landscaping probe, Adams one day found a nameplate belonging to the grave of Aaron Boggs, the father of the namesake of UGA’s Boggs Hall. It was in “pristine condition,” Duncan says, but there was - and still is - one problem: they don’t know where it belongs.

Based on its size and on where it was found, one possibility is that the Boggs nameplate belongs with a prominent above-ground brick-and-stucco vault near the cemetery gate on Jackson Street. Duncan doesn’t know, but she hopes that further study - as well as a search for old photographs that depict parts of the cemetery, even in the background - will bring an answer. In addition, she’s looking forward eventually to a more methodical survey of lost, buried objects.

“I think we’re going to find some wonderful information and be able to re-recognize some of the people that are buried, lost,” she says.

For now, the brick vault - though still anonymous - is getting fixed up. In December, a small crew of specialty masons from Lexington, VA spent the better part of a week re-laying the structure’s crumbling brickwork. New Dimension Building’s John Friedrichs, his son Leaven and apprentice Billy Friar make up one of a handful of companies in the country able to do the kind of historic masonry called for on Jackson Street.

“It’s interesting,” Friar observed after a day’s work last month, “you know, for somebody to be having a tomb built, they were probably real prominent at one time, but it just fades into history.”

Prominent or not, the vault’s resident couldn’t help preserve his own tomb: in the mid-20th century, some well-intentioned soul poured cement to replace the plaster topcoat covering the vault’s bricks. That was a mistake - cement doesn’t let moisture travel the way mortar and plaster do - and it led to severe deterioration. Still, John Friedrichs pointed out after working on it, one end of the vault was perfectly even and straight by his carpenter’s level. “In places,” he said, “the craft is still there from the original building of it.”

When Friedrichs and his crew left Athens last month, they’d fixed the brickwork but not put a new plaster topcoat on the vault. Duncan will wait to do that until she can find out what the original topcoat looked like. Even then, passersby and visitors who’ve become accustomed to seeing a brick tomb may be surprised by its appearance. Says Duncan, “There’s gonna be a fair number of people in town who know that this would have had stucco on it. But it’s looked like this for so long, it will be jarring - but it’s not gonna look like an adobe.”

The vault, it turns out, provides a microcosm for the whole effort at the cemetery. Duncan’s explanation of that particular grave’s repair could apply to the whole place: “We’re just trying to do it in stages and not try to make it look pretty…. It’s not supposed to look pretty. It’s supposed to look its age, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

“You just want it to be structurally sound, and preserved.”

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Structural repairs at the cemetery mostly fall under the purview of the Chicora Foundation, of Columbia, SC, a nonprofit firm that specializes in sensitive historic preservation. Workers with Chicora have also used a poultice to remove oil crayon from an obelisk, and have repaired broken-off headstones like one belonging to Samuel Maxwell, “A Native of Ireland,” as his stone says. Maxwell was a young boy of either 11 or 14 - the engraving is too eroded to tell - and Duncan speculates that his family may have been just passing through town when he died.

“There are people that I can’t find,” she says. “There’s a lady named Maria Pasteur… I cannot really find her in a U.S. census. I can find people that would be approximately that age. But I think there were a fair number of people, you know, who fell ill and died when they were in town. And he [Maxwell] maybe was with his family and they could have been on their way someplace else, and he died here and they had enough to erect a larger marker, and then they kept going. You know… the [early] students certainly weren’t sent back home, so there are students and there are University tutors in here as well. There was one guy named Sylvander Hutchinson who came down from Newton, Massachusetts, and he died three months after he arrived. And he was a University tutor.” There is also Anne McDonald - the first wife of Georgia Governor Charles McDonald. “She was in town - I read her obit - she came to town to visit her sister and died.”

Then there are the known individuals who are missing headstones. Some of them have been missing their headstones for a long time, but for some the loss is more recent. Vandals stole Aaron Bogg’s wife’s headstone over the weekend of UGA’s graduation in May of 2006. Duncan, who was working on her Master’s thesis about the cemetery at that time, recalls being “livid” when she discovered the theft the following Monday. The stone had been re-set in a granite slab in the 1930s, she says. “So you needed a minimum of three people to lift it and open the gate. Minimum.” Vandalism is declining with pieces in storage, but innocent visitors can cause damage, too; Duncan still has to ask people not to sit on stones. Also, the stones are too old to withstand rubbings. “Rubbings are extremely bad,” she says. “If somebody wants a picture of one, I’d be glad to supply them one of the stock pictures…. [The stones are] eroded enough.”

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A range of citizens are buried in the cemetery, which is likely one of the very oldest city cemeteries in Georgia. “You just have this huge cross-section of the population,” Duncan says. “You’ll notice there’s no formal rows. There are kind of stripey rows going north-south, but there’s no east-west grid. And that’s because of the topography, and it’s a common burial ground, so you just say, ’I want to be here.’ So you have the Lampkins next to a shopkeeper next to whatever. It’s not pure hierarchy that you would see in a lot of other cemeteries, where the wealthy families would get the spot on the hill or what have you. It was ’Hey, we got here first, so….’”

One prominent family with a plot in the cemetery is that of Moses Waddel, an early UGA president. The family’s main plot, though, is at Oconee Hills Cemetery, and common thought holds that Waddel is buried there.

“One of his grandsons is here,” however, Duncan says. “And it would have been very unusual during the Victorian era to leave a family member alone if you were on the other side of town and you had the means to move them. And especially if it’s a child - he’s a little boy; I think he died when he was five.”

How to find out? For one, she’ll get assistance from archaeology students working under Dr. Erv Garrison, who’ve been using ground-penetration radar (known as GPR) to survey what’s beneath the surface of the cemetery. “So if it looks like there’s something around the grandson…” she trails off. The work of reconstructing lost history is slow.

There’s one general fact about the cemetery - backed up by GPR surveys - that comes as a surprise to the uninformed visitor, but didn’t to Duncan. The majority of the indentations in the surface of the ground at the cemetery - the more you look, the more of them you see - appear in the GPR data to have the likelihood of a burial. Duncan’s current estimate of the total number of burials at the Old Athens Cemetery? Roughly 1,000.

“It’s a little like going to Colonial Cemetery in Savannah - if you step off the sidewalk at Colonial - I’ve talked with the cemetery manager for Savannah, and they’re estimating that there are about 4500 people in that small cemetery, and they’ve got them doubled up. And he said you can’t walk anywhere in there without stepping on somebody. It’s… to a great extent, it’s like that here.” (One big exception is at the cemetery’s lower end, near Thomas Street, where a commonly-used footpath connects the School of Art to Baldwin Hall.)

Over the years, the cemetery has weathered a variety of threats, from campus planning concepts or ideas for railroad spurs that would have destroyed it completely, to vandals, to gameday tailgaters treating it like any other campus greenspace - and those last are still a problem.

The Old Athens Cemetery is open to visitors from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, and pets are not allowed. Per new rules to eliminate vandalism, visitors outside of the stated hours are subject to arrest for trespassing.

“So, I’m just trying to keep it tidy, keep it safe, and get the repairs coordinated,” Duncan says. “It’ll never look new, but I just want it to look cared for and to have people appreciate what’s here.”

Ben Emanuel