May 29th, 2005, 10:54 pm

Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta

Click through for the Flickr
show, which is annotated
with neat historical facts

Today I took advantage of the late May rainy weather and my carlessness and walked over to the Oakland Cemetery. Who knew, all of these nights when I’d been watching Gone With the Wind on Turner South that I was actually sitting ten minutes from Margaret Mitchell’s grave? Needless to say, I was pretty psyched. History dork me got very excited. 6,900 confederate soldiers are buried here, along with almost all Atlantans who died from 1850-1867, and scores of famous and influential families who shaped Atlanta. The place is truly a microcosm of Atlanta history; 1880s graves abutting the rail lines that first brought industry and settlers to the land; a view of the Fulton Cotton Mill (now converted to lofts) that employed the workers of Cabbagetown (where I now live); segregated sections of the cemetery that house the graves of black and Jewish Atlantans. It’s pretty nifty. There is a Flickr group of Oakland Cemetery shots … scroll past mine (when I get around to adding them) to see what other people saw.