Lost and Found (The Potter's Fields of North Georgia)

The Poet

Bury me in a nameless grave!

I came from God the world to save.

I brought them wisdom from above:

Worship, and liberty, and love.

They slew me for I did disparage

Therefore Religion, Law, and Marriage.

So be my grave without a name

That earth may swallow up my shame!

• Aleister Crowley, infamous poet and black magician of the mid-twentieth Century.

Potter's field "piece of ground reserved as a burying place for friendless paupers, unknown persons, and criminals" (1520s; early 14c. as potter's place) is Biblical (Matthew xxvii.7), a ground where clay suitable for pottery was dug, later purchased by high priests of Jerusalem as a burying ground for strangers, criminals, and the poor. [Purchased with the coins paid to Judas for betraying Jesus; these being considered blood money it was then known in Aramaic as Akeldema, "field of blood."]

There was a tradition in the United States beginning in the 17th Century and lasting through the mid-20th Century, for almshouses to be created at a county level, houses for the poor, indigent, orphaned, elderly, or infirm, to provide shelter and limited work for those who could not care for themselves, yet, weren't criminal enough to be in jails, prisons, or convict camps.

Oftentimes the residents, in conjunction with outside help, operated farms as a way to offset the costs of their stay. The noun Poorhouse, enters the American English language as early as 1781, and poor-farm, can be attested to 1834.

In Pickens County, the poorhouse was referred to as the Pauper's Home. The home in Pickens had a farm on the property and was located very close to the county's Convict Camp.

Unlike the poorhouses of Fulton and Cherokee County, no record can be found of a poorhouse cemetery. Many of the inmates, upon death, were buried in the City Cemetery nearby. If there is a cemetery of unmarked graves, it would be located in District 13, on Land Lot 22 near the line of LL 51.

Likely area of Pauper's Home and unmarked graves

Even though Federal census records reflect very few occupants were housed there as each ten-year census was taken, it is likely some folks moved in and out of the homes as vagrants.

NOTE: As was common all over the country, people who lived in poor houses were listed as Inmates

Atlanta's first almshouse was destroyed in the Civil War. In 1869, the first records of a Pauper's Cemetery appeared in Fulton County near the present location of Westview Cemetery.

In 1881, the second almshouse was built by convict labor in a rural area near the corner of Piedmont and Peachtree on about 300 acres. In 1889, the pauper's cemetery was moved there.

The March 5th, 1905, Atlanta Constitution, detailed Mayor Woodward of Atlanta's order to have Police Chief Ball remove all the misshapen, deformed, and maimed and get them out of the streets and into the poorhouses. Shortly before, laws were passed outlawing panhandling in the city. The familiar themes of out of sight, out of mind, and the homeless were becoming a real problem.

In 1911, near present-day Chastain Park, the Galloway House was built as an almshouse for white people. Situated in a 1,000-acre park, it and its sister building, presently known as the Chastain Arts Center, was built nearby to house black indigents.

Former almshouse of Fulton County - later called Haven Hill

Former almshouse for African Americans built in 1911

in 1934 over 311 paupers were disinterred and moved to the North Fulton Park site near the present Chastain Park.

During the Great Depression, in North Fulton Park, during the mid-30s, one of Georgia's four transient camps was built as part of a 400-acre complex. They would build swimming pools, a golf course, and more. Nearby, two buildings were set up to house the homeless.

Three of the four transient camps were for whites, the only one for blacks was in Fulton County. The *transient camp in Commerce, Georgia, barely avoided a mutiny by its inmates for the abrupt cut off from government funds.

In the Fulton County potter's field, the graves were dug by actual prisoners from nearby camps.

A description from the Atlanta Constitution in 1949 describes a typical occupant of the graveyard.

"He was just a tired and dirty old man who failed to rouse and move along when patrolmen on the morning watch flashed their lights over the alleyway where he sprawled.

His worldly goods consisted of 17 cents, a streetcar token, a crumpled pack of half-smoked cigarettes, and the unwashed clothes on his back.

The coroner's verdict was "acute poisoning - drinking denatured alcohol."

They never learned his name, although his wizened old body lay in the Grady Hospital morgue for six days while reluctant undertakers and welfare workers attempted to trace relatives, friends...anybody who would shoulder the burden of his burial.

Because no one came forward, he is lying today with others of his derelict legion - the friendless, the suicides, the unwanted - in Atlanta's potter's field. There was no funeral service beforehand. There were neither mourners nor flowers at the graveside.

The mortician's assistant explained: The county only pays up to $50....You can't hardly bury a dog well for that!"

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By the middle of the 20th Century, due to the creation of many programs like the Social Security Act, WPA, and state-run mental institutions, the number of almshouses, and people that would live in them declined rapidly.

Much to my surprise, the discovery of unmarked graves of slaves, the indigent, children, and others who could not fend for themselves have been discovered throughout North Georgia, and I suspect the United States. The following is a non-comprehensive list of just a few of the unmarked gravesites discovered in North Georgia since 2014:

• In 2014, The Chastain Park Conservancy Group, the group that aims to preserve the two almshouses and other places of historic importance within Fulton County. They hired a company to use Ground Penetrating Radar in search of unmarked graves. They discovered 86 of them. Most of them were adjacent to the fifth green of the park's golf course.

• in 2016, in nearby Cherokee County, near Sunnyside Cemetery (in an unmarked cemetery) in Canton, 136 unmarked graves were found near where the county's former poorhouse was located using GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar)

• In 2019, at the Sugar Hill Baptist Cemetery, Gwinett County, 130 unmarked graves were discovered in the oldest part of the cemetery dating back to 1886 using GPR.

• In 2022, over 230 unmarked African-American graves were discovered by using GPR at Mt. Hope Cemetery, Dahlonega, in Dawson County.

• In 2023, near Island Baptist Church in Sugar Hill, Gwinett County, over 25 unmarked graves of slaves were found using GPR.

• In 2024, 67 unmarked graves were found in Ellijay, Gilmer County, on a Land Lot that once housed a church in the 1800s.

  
  

• There are over 5,100 unmarked graves in the God's Acre section of Atlanta's Westview Cemetery. Most of them were buried between 1884 and 1907.
  

*The materials for building the transient camp in Commerce, Georgia were taken from CCC Camp 1449/P-77 in Pickens County at the end of 1934. In another twist, H.V. Brinkman, the man on the far left of the park dedication photo, was one of the civilian leaders of Camp 1449 and a native of Jasper.