Sara L. Van Beck

It is easy to simply take Oakland’s majestic trees for granted. Yes, they give so much: cooling shade, bird perches, oxygen cleaned of pollutants, and suffuse the grounds with a light perfume when in bloom. Many of the largest trees,…

Little is known of Oakland’s horticultural landscape in its first two decades. Few Atlanta newspaper issues survive from the 1850s. Except for bemoaning the town’s destruction during the Battle of Atlanta, not many people wrote about the “City Grave Yard”…

The early 1870s were the dawn of a new golden era for the “City Grave Yard.” A new cemetery design and a new ethos of landscape gardening brought by the newly-elected Sexton, John Connally, fostered a sense of pride among…

In 1866 the City of Atlanta began its long-needed expansion of the City Grave Yard. While the design we know today was laid out in early 1867, the roots of its design reach back to the preceding decade. During the…

In Oakland’s early halcyon days of the 1870s and 1880s, neatly trimmed hedges of geometric perfection were de rigueur. Soon after Oakland expanded in the late 1860s, families began planting hedges and evergreens. By the mid-1880s, elaborate lot designs of exacting…

One of the best parts of research is the thrill of finding something completely new. In the past, this usually meant finding a document or image at a library or an archival repository, but now it often means finding a…

As part of the Historic Oakland Foundation Master Plan historical research, historic landscape images of the cemetery were compiled. In the Foundation’s reference materials is a photocopy of an mid-1870's stereoview of a cemetery purported to be Oakland. The image…