Preserving historic cemeteries.
In 2006, Buckhead native Tamara Bazzle and a group of like-minded friends recognized the need to preserve the area’s rich history and founded Buckhead Heritage. For her 18 years of service, the emeritus board member recently received the organization’s Bob Helget Award for Outstanding Volunteerism.
Bazzle, who had explored old cemeteries with her grandmother when she was a child, became chair of the cemetery committee. “Our first project was to restore Harmony Grove Cemetery at the corner of West Paces Ferry and Chatham roads where our co-founder, Wright Mitchell, passed on his regular runs,” Bazzle says. “When he noticed an obelisk, he knew it marked a grave site.”
The committee commissioned an ecological study that found 171 graves on the land formerly owned by James H. “Whispering” Smith, a white resident. He had stipulated in his will that 2 acres on nearby Arden Road be set aside for African Americans to worship. Services continue to be held today at New Hope African Methodist Episcopal Church.
They’ve also preserved and maintained two additional historic Buckhead cemeteries: Piney Grove Cemetery on Canterbury Road and Mt. Olive next to Bagley Park, the last existing African-American community formed by newly freed slaves that dates back to the 1870s.
BUCKHEAD HERITAGE
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