On June 10, 2022, Historic Oakland Foundation and the City of Atlanta Department of Parks and Recreation held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the completion of the restoration of Oakland Cemetery's historic African American Burial Grounds. Speakers for the event…
In restoring Oakland Cemetery, we uncover more than just historic materials. We uncover the stories of those that made up Atlanta—the grand and the humble alike. Repairing the headstone In February 2022, Angeline Malone’s headstone was accidentally damaged during a…
Oakland Cemetery is known for its beautiful and elaborate granite and marble monuments. They stand out against the landscape as grand tributes to the dead. But not all headstones at Oakland are made from natural stone. Some are composed of…
Meet Historic Oakland Foundation GIS intern and GSU graduate student Lindsey Goff. Here, Lindsey describes her work attempting to match burial records with unmarked graves in Oakland's historic African American Burial Grounds. At the beginning of 2021, I became a…
In 2018, Historic Oakland Foundation's PRO Team restored the Smith-Callaway ledgers in Oakland's historic African American Burial Grounds. Director of Preservation Ashley Shares and Preservation and Operations Specialist Sean Diaz describe re-leveling the marble ledgers in a relatively small space…
In 2017, Historic Oakland Foundation’s preservation team embarked upon a phased restoration project in one of its most historically and culturally rich sections: the African American Grounds. During the three-year project, the team not only restored headstones and monuments but…
Winter is rapidly drawing in and with it, the third and final phase of the Preservation, Restoration and Operations (PRO) Team’s efforts in the African American Grounds is coming to an end. (Though truly, at Oakland Cemetery, preservation never really…
After many months of hard work, the Preservation, Restoration, and Operations (PRO) Team has completed Phase 1 of hardscape restoration in the African American Grounds. Phase 1 encompasses the southernmost portion of the section, roughly one acre of land. The…
One of the past year’s landscape restoration projects at Oakland has been the southern portion of the African American Grounds. As with all restoration projects, garden history research on the area and its families was conducted to guide the design.…
by DL Henderson The headstone belonging to Jacob McKinley is located in Phase 1 of the African American Grounds restoration project. It is a pedestal-style monument, composed of multiple units of marble “freely” stacked, one on top of another, without…
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Outdoors
