Buckhead's Historic Preservation Group Began at One Overgrown Cemetery on West Paces Ferry

On a spring morning in 2005, Wright Mitchell was on his usual jog through Buckhead with his two dogs. He made an unplanned turn onto Chatham Road. In what looked like a vacant wooded lot, he saw an odd shape among the trees. In Atlanta Magazine's account, he walked through the underbrush and found a 15-foot stone obelisk turned green with moss, then headstones scattered around it, many lying flat under weeds and vines.

"I was surprised that I'd lived in Buckhead all my life and had no idea that cemetery was there," Mitchell told the magazine.

That cemetery was Harmony Grove. Mitchell started the Buckhead Heritage Society to save it, and restoring Harmony Grove became the new group's first project. Twenty-one years later, the group is dedicating a new historic marker at the site this Saturday, November 14, at 2 p.m. The speaker is Mitchell, who is now president and CEO of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation. He will talk about the cemetery's history and how Buckhead Heritage came to be its caretaker.

A small rise at the corner most people drive past

Buckhead Heritage describes Harmony Grove as a small rise at the southwest corner of West Paces Ferry and Chatham Roads. It is surrounded by trees and covers a little less than one acre. Seen from a car at the light, it reads as a stand of hardwoods between houses. Mitchell took it for exactly that until he walked in.

The cemetery has been counted several times, and the archaeologists' count is by far the largest.

The difference between 40 and 171 comes down to how people marked graves. Buckhead Heritage says 40 graves have traditional inscribed headstones, and the rest are unmarked or marked with fieldstones. A fieldstone carries no name, so it does not show up in a list of names. The mapping that found the full count was a large part of Mitchell's restoration project.

Who is buried there

Nobody knows exactly when the cemetery began. The earliest documented burials belong to the family of James H. "Whispering" Smith, who owned land nearby. The first recorded burial is his infant son James, who died on March 4, 1870. Smith died two years later and was buried at Harmony Grove beside his son.

Smith's will set aside two acres on what is now Arden Road for local African Americans to use for worship. The church they built there was New Hope A.M.E. New Hope sits on a different street and has its own history, but it traces back to the same landowner whose family is buried at Harmony Grove.

The cemetery is first named in a written record in 1889. That year Wiley Rice deeded the land to Harmony Grove Congregational Church for "church and burial purposes." The congregation became Harmony Grove Baptist in 1903. Buckhead Heritage believes the church building was probably torn down in the early 1920s. Atlanta Magazine dates the demolition to 1918, says it made room for new homes, and reports that the cemetery was then abandoned and slowly fell into disrepair.

The grave identification chart from the archaeological work names members of the Mathis, Moss, Crane, Beal, Sims, Krause and Smith families, among others. They include J.S. and Mattie Mathis, John N. and Susan G. Sims, and August and Charlotte Krause. According to Buckhead Heritage, Confederate veterans and prominent local businessmen are also buried there, along with the father of Dorothy Shay, the singer known as "The Park Avenue Hillbillie," and the great-grandparents of actress Julia Roberts.

The archaeologists also showed how the cemetery was laid out. Atlanta Magazine reported that many graves in the southern half were marked with simple fieldstones, and that the ground there held clusters of broken crockery, an old African American burial custom. The cemetery had been split evenly between white and Black burials, separated by race but in the same ground.

"Harmony Grove is our signature project, and it speaks to the duality of the community's history." Erica Danylchak, then Buckhead Heritage's executive director, speaking to Atlanta Magazine in 2016

How the overgrown lot became a cared-for green space

The restoration took about three years. Buckhead Heritage hired mortuary archaeologists, landscape architects and headstone repair specialists. Its project phases page lays out the work in order:

• April 2006. The first cleanup phase starts the week of April 9. In Rough Draft Atlanta's report that spring, Buckhead Rotary is named as a partner with Buckhead Heritage.
• October 2007. Archaeological mapping begins. New South Associates maps the site and probes for graves.
• Fall 2008. Volunteers carry out much of the landscape plan, including a stone path and new plantings, at a Hands On Atlanta workday.
• 2009. The work receives the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation's Preservation Award for Excellence in Rehabilitation.
• January to August 2011. Patch reported that Buckhead Heritage hired Dustin Hornsby, restoration manager at the Historic Oakland Foundation, to repair seven priority headstones.

Buckhead Heritage has kept maintaining the site since then. The group calls Harmony Grove "a functional green space in Buckhead and a tangible link to Buckhead's rural past." The award connects to Saturday's speaker. In 2009 the Georgia Trust honored the restoration of the cemetery that led Mitchell to start Buckhead Heritage. Today he runs the Georgia Trust.

Saturday at the corner, and a book talk two days earlier

Buckhead Heritage names the DAR Atlanta Chapter and the George M. Brown Trust Fund of Atlanta among the major donors who paid for the marker, and it will recognize them at the dedication. The group's events page has the details:

1. When: Saturday, November 14, at 2 p.m.
2. Where: Harmony Grove Cemetery, at the intersection of Chatham and West Paces Ferry Roads.
3. Parking: Park along Chatham Road.
4. Rain date: Sunday, November 15, at 2 p.m.

On Thursday, November 12, two days before the dedication, Mitchell speaks at 7 p.m. in the Gould Room at the Cathedral of Saint Philip as part of Buckhead Heritage's free Speaker Series. His subject is his book, Georgia's First Elected Governor: John Adam Treutlen and the American Revolution. Treutlen came to colonial Georgia from Germany as an indentured servant and became the state's chief executive during the most dangerous stretch of the Revolution. The book won the 2026 Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council's Excellence in Scholarship Award and has been nominated for the national George Washington Prize. Registration is on the Buckhead Heritage events page.

Buckhead Heritage's next event after that is its Holiday Gathering on Sunday, December 13, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Melanie Turner and Stan Benecki are hosting at the Calhoun-Thornwell Estate, the 12,000-square-foot Italianate house also known as the Pink Castle or Tryggveson. Hentz, Reid & Adler completed the house in 1923. Single tickets are $175 for members and $200 for non-members.

For the history that runs from Whispering Smith's 1872 will to the 2009 award, the society's Harmony Grove history page links to the deeds and records it has collected.

Dorsey Alston Realtors has been part of Buckhead since 1947, and our agents value the people and organizations that keep places like Harmony Grove cared for. If you are thinking about a home near West Paces Ferry and want an advisor who knows the history behind the streets, Work With Us.