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Beneath Southern Stone: Atlanta's Haunted Soul · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Good morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:15
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristin.
0:17
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Oakland Cemetery, located in Atlanta, Georgia.
0:24
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug, cozy up and let's take a dig into history.
0:29
Kristin: Each year, more than 55 million souls pass through Atlanta, most of them never setting foot in the city itself.
0:38
Kristin: They slip through terminals and concourses, catching connecting flights, but not glimpses of the streets below.
0:45
Kristin: It's the curse of being home to the world's busiest airport so many eyes on the sky but none on the ground.
0:53
Kristin: And yet, beneath this modern city of steel and light, Atlanta's past waits in silence.
0:59
Kristin: That silence is best kept at Oakland Cemetery.
1:03
Kristin: That silence is best kept at Oakland Cemetery.
1:07
Kristin: Oakland was established in 1850 when the city of Atlanta purchased six acres from AW Wooding.
1:10
Kristin: It was to be the new multiposable cemetery built on the eastern edge of a young and growing city.
1:16
Kristin: That original tract, a southwest corner of what is now a sprawling necropolis, is known as the original Six Acres.
1:25
Kristin: This section holds the oldest graves in Oakland, with Agnes Wooding within, buried in the land before it was even purchased from her husband.
1:34
Kristin: The first person to be officially interred after the cemetery was established was Dr Gritjames Nielsen, a visiting physician from Virginia.
1:44
Kristin: He died of sudden illness while passing through Atlanta and was laid to rest in 1850.
1:50
Kristin: His is the oldest public marker or still standing in the cemetery, a lone witness to time's slow erosion To the South.
1:59
Kristin: The cemetery tells a more complex story through the Jewish grounds, which include Jewish Hill and Jewish Flat.
2:06
Kristin: Jewish Hill was purchased in 1878 by Levi Cohen, president of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, now simply known as the Temple.
2:16
Kristin: This was the second acquisition of land by a Jewish group in Oakland, following the old Jewish burial grounds in 1860, a small plot nestled in the southeastern section of the old cemetery, jewish Hill, reflects the German-Jewish community's gradual assimilation and the prevailing Victorian culture of Atlanta.
2:37
Kristin: Stately mausoleums and ornate statues mark the dead, shaded by trees and thoughtfully landscaped areas.
2:44
Kristin: In contrast, the Jewish flat immediately to the west acquired in 1892, tells a harder tale.
2:52
Kristin: This section was shared with the Ha'aveth Vakim congregation, composed mostly of Russian-Jewish immigrants.
2:59
Kristin: Their graves are densely packed, headstones rising close together, an adherence to an old world tradition.
3:06
Kristin: Narrow winding paths leave little room to walk, as every inch of earth eventually gave way to the dead.
3:13
Kristin: Hebrew inscriptions still linger in the stone, a sharp contrast to the German-Jewish graves nearby, where the language has already faded from use in the 1890s.
3:24
Kristin: Oakland holds more than just cultural legacies it holds the echoes of war too.
3:29
Kristin: Near its center lies the Confederate Burial Grounds, the final resting place of nearly 7,000 Confederate soldiers, many of them unnamed.
3:39
Kristin: This area began as a transformation in 1866, after the city acquired additional land and the Atlanta Ladies Memorial Association began their solemn work.
3:50
Kristin: At first, graves were marked by wooden headboards, fragile, impermanent, but in 1890, these were replaced with marble markers, simple and rounded at the top, like hundreds of sorrowful eyes staring skyward.
4:05
Kristin: At the heart of this area stands the tallest monument in Oakland, a 60-foot granite obelisk dedicated to the Confederate dead.
4:13
Kristin: Its foundation, made from stone mountain granite, was laid in 1870, the same day as Robert E Lee's funeral.
4:21
Kristin: It wasn't completed until April 26, 1874, confederate Memorial Day.
4:29
Kristin: Cold and towering, the Ablesse cast a long shadow over the field of the dead.
4:34
Kristin: Elsewhere, division and injustice lay buried beneath the soil.
4:38
Kristin: From the very beginning, the burial of slaves and free African Americans was segregated by law and custom.
4:47
Kristin: In 1852, the Atlanta City Council decreed that enslaved slaves were to be buried at the far eastern edge of the cemetery.
4:55
Kristin: This became Slave Square.
4:57
Kristin: But as Oakland expanded, the dead were not left in peace.
5:01
Kristin: Many African American graves were exhumed, moved once or even twice until finally laid to rest near what is now known as the African-American grounds, or, historically, the Black Section.
5:14
Kristin: Here, within a space partially enclosed by Circle Drive, paths were never paved, only lined with brick and filth-bushed, crushed limestone.
5:24
Kristin: Paved only lined with brick and filth-brushed, crushed limestone, cinders and chert.
5:29
Kristin: In this somber corner stands a single mausoleum belonging to Antone Graves, a realtor and educator.
5:33
Kristin: Other prominent figures also rest nearby Bishop Wesley, john Gaines, founder of Morris Brown College, reverend Frank Corals, who helped establish what would become Spelman College, and Kerry Steele Logan, who created Atlanta's first orphanage for African American children.
5:52
Kristin: In 1866, the city purchased another 24 acres of farmland from Lemuel P Green.
5:59
Kristin: Part of that land, near the southeastern corner of the cemetery, became known as Rogers Hill, though the origin of the name remains a mystery.
6:07
Kristin: This area has been since renamed East Hill, the final portion of Oakland to be developed.
6:14
Kristin: Unlike older sections, east Hill is more open, with fewer trees and more stone walls.
6:24
Kristin: The landscape is broken by grid-like lines of Monument Drive and Old Hunter Street Drive.
6:26
Kristin: The ground rips northward, descending into the pauper's grounds.
6:30
Kristin: Two comfort stations, long sealed, still haunt the area.
6:34
Kristin: A woman's comfort station restored in 2019, sits just below street level near the Confederate grounds.
6:41
Kristin: The men's comfort station lies near the African-American sections, its doors long closed.
6:48
Kristin: East of Belltower Ridge is Greenhouse Valley, bordered by Potter's Field and the African-American grounds.
6:54
Kristin: Oakland's first greenhouse was built here in 1870.
6:58
Kristin: Two more then followed in the years after, but by the 1970s all had vanished, demolished or left to rot.
7:06
Kristin: A steam plant and barn remain silent sentinels of a forgotten age.
7:11
Kristin: The greenhouse that stands now, gifted by the Buckhead Men's Garden Club, rises from the ruins a steel and glass resurrection over the bones of history.
7:21
Kristin: Beyond the African-American grounds, a sloping green hillside holds one of Oakland's most sorrowful secrets Hoddersfield.
7:30
Kristin: Here roughly 7,500 of Atlanta's most destitute were buried Indignant, the unnamed, the unwanted.
7:38
Kristin: Yet archaeological surveys from the 1970s suggest they were not all poor.
7:44
Kristin: Some belonged to the city's lower middle class, buried without markers, spaced scarcely a foot apart, once marked by wooden boards, time and weather devoured their name.
7:55
Kristin: The field was used until the mid-1880s.
7:59
Kristin: Today, a single rectangular monument stands among the grass, carved with the words A Memorial to the Citizens of Atlanta who were buried in unmarked graves.
8:09
Kristin: Floodwaters come here often uninvited, catch basins gape in the hillside and a granite swale coils like a serpent along the boulevard's stone wall, channeling runoff through the graveyard of the forgotten dead.
8:23
Kristin: Channeling runoff through the graveyard of the forgotten dead High, and above all, along a ridge that bisects the cemetery.
8:28
Kristin: North to south stands Bell Tower Ridge, named for the structure built here in 1899, it once held a chapel that served as a home for the cemetery sexton.
8:40
Kristin: Before the Bell Tower, a two-story farmhouse occupied this very spot, erased by time In 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta, it became the headquarters for the Confederate General John B Hood.
8:52
Kristin: Now the Bell Tower houses Oakland Visitor Center, its museum shop and the offices of the historic Oakland Foundation.
8:59
Kristin: But the hill it stands on is anything but welcoming.
9:03
Kristin: It's dominated by family plots of the city's wealthiest graves, marked by opulent mausoleums, gothic in design and etched with sorrow and pride.
9:13
Kristin: Here lie Atlanta's elite.
9:15
Kristin: A monument to the city's mayors also reside in this section.
9:20
Kristin: 28 of them rest beneath the earth within Oakland Cemetery.
9:24
Kristin: 28 of them rest beneath the earth within Oakland Cemetery.
9:27
Kristin: Being in the heart of the South, it would seem fitting that the greatest movie of all times writer would hail from Atlanta and be buried within Oakland's grounds.
9:35
Kristin: Margaret Mutter, lynn Mitchell, was born into a city that had already burned once and into a family steeped in the lingering grief of a lost war.
9:43
Kristin: By November 8th in 1900, she would only live to 48 years old, long enough to pen a single novel that would mythologize the Old South and break her immortality.
9:55
Kristin: Gone with the Wind earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and a permanent place in the haunted canon of American letters.
10:04
Kristin: But the bright lights of her success cast long shadows.
10:07
Kristin: Beneath the posh veneer of society was a woman shaped by war, fire, loss and rage, a woman who the past was not the past but a ghost.
10:18
Kristin: Margaret was the daughter of Eugene Mewes Mitchell, an attorney, and Mary Elizabeth Mabel Stevens, a suffragist and devout Catholic.
10:27
Kristin: From her earliest days she stood at the crossroads of Southern tradition and rebellion.
10:32
Kristin: Her family tree was tangled with Confederates, slaveholders, irish immigrants and war-wounded men whose stories never healed On her father's side, surveyors, soldiers and settlers.
10:45
Kristin: Her grandfather, russell Crawford Mitchell, fought in the Confederacy, was gravely wounded at Sharpsburg and later supplied lumber to rebuild the city.
10:54
Kristin: Sherman had left in ashes, on her mother's side, the Fitzgeralds of rural home plantation, a family that owned, slaved and preached piety.
11:03
Kristin: In the same breath, her maternal grandparents, annie Fitzgerald and Captain John Stevens raised 12 children and saw Atlanta rise from the soot.
11:12
Kristin: She was born into wealth, power and myth, and into a world still echoing with cannon fire and the moans of Reconstruction.
11:21
Kristin: As a child, margaret lived on Jackson Hill in a red and yellow Victorian house that overlooked a neighborhood known as Darktown where African-American Atlantans lived and labored.
11:31
Kristin: She was five when the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre erupted.
11:36
Kristin: White mobs, stirred by lies in the papers, tore through the city, murdering African-American citizens indiscriminately.
11:44
Kristin: Her father, unable to find a gun, took up a sword to protect his family, but the violence left behind scars.
11:52
Kristin: The past was not a story to Margaret.
11:54
Kristin: It was a threat waiting to return.
11:57
Kristin: Her mother dressed her in boyish clothes after her dress caught fire and from then on she was Jimmy.
12:03
Kristin: She rode ponies, told wild tales and believed General Lee had won the war.
12:09
Kristin: At 10, she was shattered by the truth that the South had fallen.
12:12
Kristin: The illusion cracked, but longing remained.
12:16
Kristin: The Confederacy became her obsession and history her hiding place.
12:20
Kristin: Her mother, whipsmart and unforgiving, raised her with a sense of duty.
12:24
Kristin: Hiding place.
12:25
Kristin: Her mother, whipsmart and unforgiving, raised her with a sense of duty, discipline and doom.
12:31
Kristin: Maybelline Mitchell hissed threats beneath suffragette speeches and took Margaret to rallies, where she sat draped in a votes-for-women sash while blowing kisses to shock gentlemen.
12:37
Kristin: But her mother's voice would soon fade, far too soon.
12:40
Kristin: In 1919, maybelline died of the Spanish flu while Margaret was away at school.
12:45
Kristin: Her final message written in shaky script live your own life and give yourself only what is left over.
12:53
Kristin: Margaret returned home the next day too late, before the flu stole her mother.
12:58
Kristin: War had already stolen her heart, though Margaret had fallen in love with Clifford Henry, a young lieutenant who had promised her forever and left her with a ring.
13:08
Kristin: He was killed in France by an air bomb the same year her mother died.
13:13
Kristin: The poem found on his body read like an epitaph for them both.
13:17
Kristin: May those I hold dear know I have stood the acid test.
13:21
Kristin: Margaret stood too, but she never truly rose again.
13:26
Kristin: Raised on war stories, margaret filled her notebooks with them.
13:29
Kristin: Her childhood was spent nestled in the laps of dying soldiers and aging Southern women, listening to tales of honor, ruin and revenge.
13:38
Kristin: These weren't mere memories, they were doctrine.
13:41
Kristin: Her early writings were more violent, romantic, tragic.
13:44
Kristin: Her short garvalla Lost Lace, written at 15, pulsed with the themes of male obsession, sexual threat and violent redemption, motifs that would echo in Gone with the Wind.
13:56
Kristin: She devoured literature from Shakespeare to Thomas Dixon's white supremacist fiction.
14:01
Kristin: Dixon's virtually racist novels painted Reconstruction as a hellish chaos, a myth Margaret fully absorbed.
14:10
Kristin: So fully she dramatized the traitor with neighborhood children dressed as a Klan member, believed it righteous.
14:16
Kristin: These stories shaped not just her imagination but the national myth that she would later feed.
14:23
Kristin: Margaret became a debutante of the Roaring Twenties part flapper, part firebrand.
14:27
Kristin: She danced scandalously, kissed soldiers on the ballroom floor and married Baron Red Upshaw, a violent bootlegger who drank too much and hit too hard.
14:36
Kristin: He left her within months.
14:38
Kristin: She divorced him in secret, paid him off and then never looked back.
14:42
Kristin: Days later she married John Marsh, her editor and eventually her caretaker.
14:47
Kristin: But by then the ghosts were closing in.
14:50
Kristin: In 1926, confined by lingering ankle injury and boredom, john told her to write a book.
14:56
Kristin: She did it in secret.
14:58
Kristin: She poured everything—loss, war, gender, race, love, betrayal—into the life of Scarlett O'Hara, a Southern belle who clawed her way through a collapsing world.
15:09
Kristin: Gone with the Wind was published in 1936.
15:12
Kristin: Its fantasy of the Old South, burning but beautiful, captivated America.
15:18
Kristin: It was grief dressed in petticoats, a love letter to a world that had never truly existed but still haunted the nation's memory During World War II, margaret devoted herself to the soldiers, writing thousands of letters, sewing clothes and raising money, but she never wrote another novel.
15:37
Kristin: Her weapon had already been fired.
15:39
Kristin: On August 11, 1949, she crossed Peachtree Street with her husband.
15:44
Kristin: A drunk off-duty taxi driver struck her down.
15:48
Kristin: She never regained consciousness.
15:50
Kristin: Five days later, margaret Mitchell died.
15:53
Kristin: Her killer, hugh Gravitt, served only 11 months.
15:57
Kristin: She was buried in Oakland Cemetery beneath a modest headstone near the Confederate dead, the paupers, the forgotten and the history she refused to forget.
16:08
Kristin: Long after her death, margaret's teenage stories were found Lost.
16:12
Kristin: Lace In was published.
16:13
Kristin: Her letters of erotica, her rage, her contradictions resurfaced.
16:19
Kristin: Her memory remains tangled in controversy, nostalgia and fire.
16:23
Kristin: The world she helped resurrect was never real, but it was powerful.
16:28
Kristin: Margaret lived in a house she called the Dump.
16:31
Kristin: She was chased by loss, seduced by the past and killed in the streets of a city she mythologized.
16:38
Kristin: She was Atlanta's ghost and vivid storyteller that never really left the haunted city to this day through her writings.
16:45
Kristin: Our next resident, though, couldn't have been more different than Mitchell, but her legacy just as legendary in the city.
16:53
Kristin: Carrie Steele Logan was born into bondage sometime around 1829 in Georgia, a state sweltering under the weight of chains and silence.
17:02
Kristin: She was a child of slavery, orphaned before memory, raised without the comfort of a mother's voice or a father's name.
17:10
Kristin: Her earliest inheritance was abandonment.
17:13
Kristin: Her first language was the hush of survival, and yet, in the ash-tinged aftermath of war and loss, she became something extraordinary a keeper of lost children, a matron of the discarded, the founder of the oldest Black orphanage in the United States.
17:30
Kristin: Her life was a long walk through grief toward grace.
17:33
Kristin: In the blurred years of slavery, young Carrie Barefoot and Nameless somehow learned to read and write, perhaps in secret, perhaps under the eye of some rare and passing mercy.
17:43
Kristin: She was just 17 when she became a mother herself.
17:47
Kristin: Still the child in chains.
17:50
Kristin: That experience, an enslaved girl holding a newborn and a world that offered neither protection nor pity, etched into her the fierce understanding that no one should have to navigate life alone.
18:02
Kristin: After emancipation, she emerged from bondage with scars, invisible but very deep.
18:07
Kristin: Her freedom came with little promise.
18:09
Kristin: She sold homemade candles and cakes in the streets of Atlanta, survival stitched into every suite.
18:16
Kristin: Later she found work at the train depot, serving as a matron, among the soot, whistles and strangers.
18:21
Kristin: Here, among the cinders and smoke, she began to notice the others, the children.
18:27
Kristin: They wandered through the station like ghosts, homeless, hungry Eyes hollowed with fear.
18:33
Kristin: No mothers, no fathers, no future.
18:35
Kristin: She took them in one by one until her home began to overflow.
18:40
Kristin: But even as her years wore thin, her resolve only hardened.
18:44
Kristin: It's appointed to me.
18:45
Kristin: In my old age she wrote to accomplish what I have believed to be great and glorious work, and one that shall live long after my poor, frail body has dropped into the dust with sick came.
18:56
Kristin: And so began the building of her legacy.
18:59
Kristin: By 1885, carrie had saved enough to purchase a home for 1,600, a feat of quite defiance and grit.
19:07
Kristin: In 1889, she formally opened the Colored Orphanage of Atlanta, the city's first refuge for Black children cast aside by the world.
19:16
Kristin: It was born not out of charity but out of necessity.
19:19
Kristin: She didn't have the luxury of waiting for support.
19:22
Kristin: Carrie raised money in the only way she could, through impassioned speeches and the few coins of the kind-hearted.
19:29
Kristin: After her plea to the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, she returned with $30.
19:35
Kristin: The Atlantic City Council then offered her $500.
19:39
Kristin: The rest came from the weary but hopeful hands of Atlanta's rising African-American middle class and from her own.
19:46
Kristin: By 1892, the orphanage had grown into a three-story brick sanctuary, raised on a stone foundation, solid, unshakable, like the woman herself.
19:56
Kristin: Fifty children could sleep there, eat there, learn there.
20:00
Kristin: She stole copies of her autobiography to keep the lights burning.
20:03
Kristin: She named Floyd Crumbly, a man of business and purpose, as this orphanage's secretary.
20:08
Kristin: Her dream had become a monument.
20:11
Kristin: But Carrie was not alone.
20:12
Kristin: In her later years Her son, james Robert Steele, born in Bodnage in 1843, stood by her side.
20:19
Kristin: They had moved together to Atlanta after the war.
20:22
Kristin: James worked as a porter, then barber, and eventually became an elder of Bethany AME Church.
20:28
Kristin: He too bore the weight of survival, his life marked by the echoes of captivity.
20:34
Kristin: In 1890, Carrie married Reverend Josiah or Joseph Logan, a minister from New York.
20:39
Kristin: But her greatest marriage was to the work, the holy labor of loving the unloved.
20:44
Kristin: She died of a stroke on November 3, 1900.
20:48
Kristin: She was 71 years old.
20:50
Kristin: Her funeral shook the city, though HR Butler, an eyewitness, said simply One of the largest funerals I had ever seen.
20:57
Kristin: All the orphaned children were out.
21:00
Kristin: Nearly every minister in the city was present.
21:03
Kristin: Gary's daily Logan was lowered into the earth at Oakland Cemetery beneath the weight of flowers and prayers.
21:10
Kristin: Her epitaph, carved into cold stone, reads like a whispered gospel Mother of orphans, she hath done what she could, but death simply didn't erase her.
21:20
Kristin: Her orphanage endured.
21:22
Kristin: It lives on today as the Carrie Steele hits home on a campus beyond the city, sheltering children just as she once did with dignity, discipline and love.
21:31
Kristin: And in 1998, the state of Georgia named her a woman of Achievement, and a bronze base relief sculpture washes over Ashburn Avenue, where the weight of her memory still hangs in the air.
21:43
Kristin: Carrie Steely Logan was a woman born into the dark, yet she carved a beacon from the wreckage of her own suffering.
21:51
Kristin: She built a home from the bones of the world that had tried to forget her.
21:55
Kristin: And now she waits in Oakland among the dead, while the house she built continues to cradle the living.
22:01
Kristin: Beneath the canopy of oaks in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery lies a quiet grave, marked not by grandeur but by reverence.
22:09
Kristin: Here arrives Robert Teer Jones Jr, born March 17, 1902, a man whose hands once held victory, like it held his birthright, and whose body would later betray him with quiet cruelty.
22:22
Kristin: He was called Bobby to distinguish himself from another.
22:26
Kristin: Robert Jones, a designer of courses rather than dreams.
22:30
Kristin: But there would be no confusion in the end, only one, bobby Jones, etched his name into legend with such furious precision, only to vanish from a game he dominated before he turned 30.
22:44
Kristin: Jones came into the world with fragile health, a boy of bone and fever.
22:48
Kristin: Proctors prescribed the open air of the golf course as medicine, and it worked.
22:53
Kristin: What emerged was not merely health, but a storm in human form.
22:56
Kristin: What emerged was not merely health, but a storm in human form.
22:58
Kristin: By the age of six he was already winning at Eastlake Golf Club, the place where he would play his final round decades later, when his legs had already begun to fail.
23:08
Kristin: At 14, he won the Georgia Amateur by 18,.
23:15
Kristin: He was paired with Henry Varden at the US Open.
23:16
Kristin: The press called him a prodigy.
23:17
Kristin: But his blood ran hot.
23:18
Kristin: He broke clubs, cursed himself, stormed off golf courses.
23:23
Kristin: In 1921, at St Andrews, jones tore up his scorecard mid-round.
23:28
Kristin: The town turned its back on him.
23:30
Kristin: He was not yet ready for the weight of the game.
23:33
Kristin: But the anger cooled, the mind sharpened, and from that tempering came terror for anyone who faced him across the T.
23:41
Kristin: Between 1923 and 1930, bobby Jones played in 31 major tournaments.
23:48
Kristin: He placed in the top 10 27 times.
23:51
Kristin: He won 13.
23:53
Kristin: He was the only man to ever achieve what the world calls now a Grand Slam.
23:57
Kristin: Not the modern one, but the impossible original the US Open, the British Open, the US Amateur, the British Amateur, all in the cursed year of 1930.
24:10
Kristin: He bet on himself at 50 to 1 odds.
24:13
Kristin: Before the season began he cashed the check for over $60,000, then turned his back on the competition.
24:20
Kristin: At 28 years old, bobby Jones walked away from golf.
24:24
Kristin: He called the championship golf a cage and perhaps he knew the bars were already closing in.
24:30
Kristin: Jones was no common athlete.
24:31
Kristin: He was an engineer, a lawyer, a man who passed the bar.
24:35
Kristin: After three semesters in Emory he married Marie Merlone.
24:38
Kristin: They had three children.
24:40
Kristin: He wore the art of decorum like a tailored coat, but in the end he would become more legend than man.
24:45
Kristin: He co-founded Augusta National.
24:48
Kristin: Carved from an old plantation land in Georgia, he and Clifford Roberts dreamed of a sanctuary, untouched, pristine and private.
24:56
Kristin: They built not only a course but a cathedral.
24:59
Kristin: In 1934, the first masters were held there.
25:03
Kristin: Jones emerged from retirement to play, not as a contender but as a host offering grace.
25:09
Kristin: Even as pain crept closer.
25:11
Kristin: He played there in 1948.
25:13
Kristin: The final round was at Eastlake, the same course where the child prodigy had first struck a ball.
25:19
Kristin: The photograph that day hangs in the clubhouse the last sewing of a man who could no longer feel his feet.
25:26
Kristin: In 1948, jones was diagnosed with syringomelia, a rare neurological disease that causes cysts to form inside the spinal cord.
25:34
Kristin: The pain came slowly at first, then weakness, then a cane, then the chair, and eventually he was paralyzed.
25:42
Kristin: The man who once danced across fairways like he was born to them now moved through the world only with assistance.
25:48
Kristin: His last years were spent in slow agony.
25:51
Kristin: The cage he had once escaped through retirement had found him again, this time in the flesh.
25:57
Kristin: He died in 1971 of cardiovascular disease, ravaged from within, just three days after being baptized into the Catholic Church.
26:06
Kristin: His widow followed him four years later.
26:09
Kristin: His son, robert III, died before either of them, his heart failing at 47.
26:15
Kristin: The legends about Bobby Jones often sound like fables.
26:18
Kristin: In 1925, he penalized himself with a stroke for barely moving his ball.
26:24
Kristin: No one else saw it.
26:25
Kristin: The stroke cost him the tournament.
26:27
Kristin: When praised, he shrugged you might as well praise me for not robbing banks.
26:31
Kristin: He was not perfect, but he believed in honor like it was oxygen.
26:35
Kristin: He's remembered with plaques, statues and tournaments the Bobby Jones Award, the Masters, the Green Jacket, the room in the USGA Museum.
26:45
Kristin: But perhaps the most honest tribute is this that no other golfer has ever walked away from the top.
26:50
Kristin: No one has ever paid so steep a price for his brilliance.
26:54
Kristin: A putting green rests near his grave at Oakland Cemetery.
26:57
Kristin: Golf balls and tokens from admirers litter the ground like offerings to an old god.
27:03
Kristin: He arose from weakness.
27:05
Kristin: He built beauty from silence.
27:07
Kristin: He swung at the world and won, but the body he had betrayed him.
27:11
Kristin: The cage closed In the waiting years of reconstruction of the South.
27:16
Kristin: As Georgia struggled to rise from the ashes of war, dr Joseph Jacobs opened a modest pharmaceutical laboratory in Athens in 1879.
27:26
Kristin: The South was fractured, its wealth of memory, its cities haunted by the scent of scorched earth and lost causes.
27:33
Kristin: But Jacobs was not a dreamer.
27:35
Kristin: He was a chemist, a man of precise mixtures and calculated risks, where he opened the Jacobs Pharmacy Company, a business that would swell to 16 locations and become a cornerstone of the city's rebirth.
27:53
Kristin: A marble soda fountain stood inside, offering tonics, seltzers and the whispered of promises of relief from the body's many ailments.
28:12
Kristin: But it wasn't Dr Jacobs himself who made history.
28:13
Kristin: It was an accident, a slip of the hand.
28:14
Kristin: In a fizz of fate, on May 8th 1886, he instructed his soda fountain manager, willis Venable, to mix a customer's headache remedy with water, something to dull the pain, something bitter and forgettable.
28:20
Kristin: But instead of still water Venable reached for carbonated water and the bubbles danced and the syrup dissolved.
28:27
Kristin: The first glass of Coca-Cola was served Sweet, dark, effervescent.
28:32
Kristin: It would become the most iconic beverage in modern history.
28:35
Kristin: Dr Jacobs held partial rights to the tonic, but when approached with the opportunity to invest in its future, he shrugged I don't want to be bothered with it.
28:45
Kristin: Instead, he sold his claim to a man named Asher Candler, treating it for a glass factory.
28:50
Kristin: A brittle monument to a short-sightedness.
28:53
Kristin: Candler would go on to build an empire.
28:56
Kristin: Coca-cola would bleed across its borders, flow into every diner, stadium and war zone.
29:01
Kristin: It would become a global altar to indulgence, addiction and American capitalism.
29:06
Kristin: And Dr Joseph Jacobs?
29:08
Kristin: His name faded from the bottle, from ads, from the billions.
29:12
Kristin: He's remembered only in passing, as the man who stood at the edge of a tidal wave and stepped aside A grave decision.
29:20
Kristin: A ghost in carbonation, a phantom of untasted fortune.
29:23
Kristin: They say power leaves a shadow.
29:26
Kristin: In Atlanta, the shadow was Mayor Jackson.
29:30
Kristin: He was born in 1938, southern heat, southern blood into a family where intellect was prized and resistance was generational.
29:37
Kristin: His grandfather was a civil rights titan, john Wesley Dobbs, a man who lit Auburn Avenue with gas lamps and fury.
29:44
Kristin: His mother, irene, held a doctorate from France, but Mayard's father, a Baptist minister, died when the boy was just 15.
29:52
Kristin: From then on, it was Dobbs' voice, radical booming, that filled the void.
29:57
Kristin: By 18, jackson was already graduated from Morehouse.
30:01
Kristin: By 30, he was running for US Senate against Herman Talmadge, a titan of segregation.
30:06
Kristin: He lost, of course, but not in Atlanta, where his name burned bright enough to crack open the city's glass ceiling.
30:12
Kristin: He would not be stopped.
30:14
Kristin: In 1973, at just 35, mayor Jackson became the first African-American mayor of Atlanta and any major southern city.
30:22
Kristin: A seismic shift.
30:24
Kristin: Wrapped in a three-piece suit, he unseated Sam Massel and took the reins of his city.
30:28
Kristin: Still bleeding from Jim Crow, his elections fractured Atlanta.
30:32
Kristin: African-american pride surged, white resistance sharpened.
30:36
Kristin: He inherited a city with crumbling infrastructure, racial tension at a boil and a police force that answered only to itself.
30:44
Kristin: He would bend it or break it into something new.
30:47
Kristin: His weapon was contracts, budgets, steel and concrete.
30:53
Kristin: He overhauled the public works, rebuilt the airport and carved out a space for African-American-owned businesses in places they had long been barred.
31:00
Kristin: Jackson demanded minority participation in billion-dollar products, not politely, but with fury that rattled boardrooms.
31:08
Kristin: Though Gard called it reverse discrimination, he called it reparative justice.
31:13
Kristin: He didn't blink.
31:14
Kristin: The power eats from the inside and Mayor Jackson would learn at a cost.
31:19
Kristin: Between 1979 and 1981, african-american children began to vanish one by one.
31:26
Kristin: Thirty of them were just gone.
31:28
Kristin: The streets whispered, parents wailed.
31:31
Kristin: The media then descended.
31:32
Kristin: Jackson supported the investigation, but no justice would ever come to those children.
31:37
Kristin: Wayne Williams was convicted of killing two adults, but the rest still shadows.
31:41
Kristin: Meanwhile, crime surged across the city.
31:43
Kristin: Atlanta earned a new name a murder capital of America.
31:47
Kristin: Drug wars took root, fed by poverty and indifference.
31:50
Kristin: In 1979 alone, homicide in the city rose 69 percent.
31:56
Kristin: The governor sent in the state patrol.
31:58
Kristin: Business leaders begged Jackson to take this chaos seriously.
32:02
Kristin: Some say he did, but others say he just blinked.
32:05
Kristin: He fired 900 sanitation workers during a strike.
32:08
Kristin: Appointed a controversial public safety commissioner, took risks, made enemies, played chess on a burning board.
32:15
Kristin: His inner circle racketed corruption, cheating scandal.
32:19
Kristin: One appointee would later be convicted of extortion.
32:22
Kristin: Jackson watched his vision blur, and yet he endured.
32:26
Kristin: In 1990, the people brought him back for a second term, a second chance.
32:30
Kristin: The Olympics were coming to town.
32:32
Kristin: The city's bones would need reshaping again, freeways carved deeper, parks remade and money flooding in the new airport terminal would bear his vision and later his name Hartsfield Jackson.
32:44
Kristin: A colossus of glass, steel and ghosts, but old problems followed him.
32:49
Kristin: Of glass, steel and ghosts, but old problems followed him Equality, crime and the pressure of a city growing too fast and too uneven.
32:55
Kristin: Progress has its victims, and Atlanta's sidewalks were crowded with them.
33:00
Kristin: After leaving office, jackson reached for the national stage.
33:03
Kristin: He wanted to lead the Democratic National Committee, but the party chose Clinton's fundraiser instead.
33:09
Kristin: He founded a voter rights institute, built coalitions, but the party chose Clinton's fundraiser instead.
33:11
Kristin: He founded a voter rights institute, built coalitions, but the crown was never his again.
33:15
Kristin: Then his body gave out.
33:18
Kristin: On June 23, 2003,.
33:19
Kristin: At just 65, mayor Jackson collapsed at Washington National Airport, his heart failing.
33:26
Kristin: A man who had carried the weight of a city died in transit between flights, between moments.
33:31
Kristin: An airport terminal bears his name, so does a high school, and a documentary was made and honors bestowed, but the man himself remains difficult, decisive and human.
33:43
Kristin: He was a builder and a breaker, a symbol of pride and a bearer of controversy.
33:47
Kristin: He opened doors and sometimes slammed them shut, but he changed Atlanta permanently.
33:53
Kristin: Many never saw it truly.
33:55
Kristin: At rest Cities.
33:56
Kristin: Don't forget the man who fought to shape them.
33:59
Kristin: But they don't forgive them either.
34:00
Kristin: Mayor Jackson lives on in concrete glass, in grief and in the whisper of every child who never came home.
34:09
Kristin: In the quiet heart of Atlanta's historic Oakland Cemetery, tucked away within the weathered Rossin Vault, lies a woman who once rattled the very bones of Southern's polite society, a woman armed with not a gun or a pulpit, but with a pen, born in 1875 to wealth, status and expectation.
34:28
Kristin: She could have lived gently, she could have stayed quiet, but instead she burned.
34:33
Kristin: Julia Calder Harris was raised on Peachtree Street Dreams, educated in finishing schools and trained as an artist in Boston.
34:42
Kristin: But life, as it often does, has other plans.
34:44
Kristin: Her mother died young, her father died under what Julia would later call suspicious circumstances, and just like that she would later call suspicious circumstances.
34:51
Kristin: And just like that she was left with five younger siblings and a family name to protect.
34:55
Kristin: Her paintbrushes were packed away for good.
34:58
Kristin: At 22, she married Julian Harris, son of Joel Chandler Harris, the famed author of Uncle Remus' Tales.
35:04
Kristin: But Julia had no intention of becoming another Southern wife.
35:08
Kristin: In her husband's shadows she joined him in the newsroom and by the 1920s Julia and Julian had pulled everything they had to buy the Columbus Enquirer's son, a small-town Georgian newspaper that would become, under their leadership, one of the boldest voices in the Deep South.
35:25
Kristin: They went to war not with bullets but with editorials.
35:28
Kristin: The paper exposed local politicians who were secret members of the Ku Klux Klan.
35:33
Kristin: It reported on the lives of African American residents in a city that would have rather ignored them.
35:39
Kristin: Julia wrote against lynching, against the cruel leasing system, and when Georgia tried to pounce the anti-evolution laws, she fought back in print, calling herself a thesis evolutionist, a woman who believed in both Darwin and God.
35:54
Kristin: Needless to say, many weren't pleased.
35:56
Kristin: Advertisers pulled their funding, neighbors turned cold and then the threats came.
36:01
Kristin: And still Giulio wrote on.
36:04
Kristin: In 1926, the Inquirer's son received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the first ever awarded to anyone in Georgia.
36:12
Kristin: Her husband accepted it and said she is unyielding in the face of injustice and a constant inspiration.
36:18
Kristin: But even awards don't pay bills, and by 1929, the backlash had bled them dry.
36:24
Kristin: The Harris's were forced to sell the paper.
36:27
Kristin: Still, julia wouldn't stop.
36:29
Kristin: She wrote for the Chattanooga Times.
36:31
Kristin: She covered the Scopes monkey trial in Temesee, one of the only three reporters from Georgia to attend, while her husband filed direct dispatches.
36:40
Kristin: She wrote essays explaining the science of evolution to a frightened, faith-soaked public.
36:45
Kristin: And then the weight of it all caught up.
36:47
Kristin: By 1938, porth health and a long-simmering depression forced her into retirement.
36:53
Kristin: She retreated from the public view but she never stopped mentoring young journalists.
36:58
Kristin: Quietly, persistently, she passed the torch.
37:02
Kristin: She died in 1967 at the age of 91, her voice mostly forgotten by the public she had once provoked.
37:09
Kristin: Her body was laid to rest in Oakland Cemetery in the Rawson family vault, not far from the bones of politicians and generals whose silence she once shattered.
37:19
Kristin: She had outlived her husband, outlived her enemies, outlived the very world she'd helped change and death.
37:25
Kristin: Her honors came slowly the Georgia Newspaper Hall of Fame, the Georgia Women of Achievement, the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
37:33
Kristin: Too late to hear them, too quiet compared to the battles she had fought when it mattered most.
37:38
Kristin: But maybe that's how it is with voices like hers Never easy, never safe and always almost ahead of their time.
37:46
Kristin: Julia Culler Harris didn't belong to the world of debutantes and dinner parties.
37:50
Kristin: She belonged to the front page, to the editorial column, to the deep, uneasy truth, and she wrote about the people no one else would.
37:59
Kristin: She stood up when others sat back down.
38:02
Kristin: She spoke when it was far easier and far safer to stay silent.
38:06
Kristin: And though the ink has still long dried, her voice is still there, buried beneath stone, but never gone.
38:13
Kristin: It may be carved in marble, but her legacy, it was carved in ink.
38:19
Kristin: The gravestones, crypts and mausoleums and warm paths of Oakland Cemetery are not just markers of death.
38:26
Kristin: They're the last surviving fragments of long lives, lived, vanishing, carved in marble, crumbling in granite.
38:34
Kristin: These monuments speak where the written record has long gone silent.
38:38
Kristin: For many of Atlanta's earliest citizens, their names engraved here are the only traces left their stories etched into stone, their family ties frozen beneath soil and time stories etched into stone, their family ties frozen beneath soil and time.
38:54
Kristin: Here, funerary art is testimony.
38:54
Kristin: Architecture is elegy.
38:55
Kristin: The cemetery's hardscapes, its iron gates, its winding walkways, its cracked foundations, is the very fragile spine of a city's memory.
39:04
Kristin: Since 1976, the historic Oakland Foundation has now fought at the slow, inevitable, the quiet collapse of history.
39:12
Kristin: Over the past 46 years, they've restored 16 acres of this fading landscape, most notably the original six acres, bell Tower Ridge and the haunted stretch known as East Hill.
39:24
Kristin: Each restoration is a battle against time.
39:27
Kristin: Each grave saved is a life.
39:29
Kristin: Remembered is a battle against time.
39:31
Kristin: Each grave saved is a life remembered, but the work is far from finished.
39:34
Kristin: According to the foundation's 20-year master plan, the path ahead is steep the completion of the historic African-American burial grounds, the restoration to the southwestern edge of the old cemetery, the revival of East Hill 60% which remains in various states of ruin.
39:47
Kristin: The revival of East Hill 60% which remains in various states of ruin is still not finished.
39:52
Kristin: This work is not glamorous, it's not loud, it's slow, patient and unending.
39:57
Kristin: The Foundation's Preservation, restoration and Operations team, simply known as the Pro Team, tends to this resting place with quiet hands and watchful eyes.
40:07
Kristin: Cracks are sealed, stones are lifted, what can be restored is, and what cannot is carefully stabilized so that nothing is forgotten entirely.
40:17
Kristin: Because Oakland is not just a cemetery.
40:20
Kristin: It's a living archive of a dying city, and if we don't guard it, stone by stone, name by name, it will vanish beneath the leaves.
40:28
Kristin: And so the work continues, not just for today but for the dead who built this city or for those yet to walk among the graves.
40:36
Kristin: The historic Oakland Foundation today hasn't just restored the grounds but also brought to them into the future with events, tours and a museum.
40:45
Kristin: Events like tunes from the tombs, cross crowds from unlikely guests within and bridge is the gap between past and present.
40:52
Kristin: It shows that the grounds, although a place of mourning and remembrance, can also be part of our everyday lives, appreciated and loved daily instead of just for loss and mourning.
41:03
Kristin: The grave grind for Oakland Cemetery was an iced mocha latte from Green Beans.
41:08
Kristin: For more honorary grinds in the area, please visit the-grim.
41:12
Kristin: com.
41:13
Kristin: For now, we're closing the gate on Oakland Cemetery.
41:16
Kristin: We hope you enjoyed our dig into history.
41:19
Kristin: If you did subscribe today to join us next time when we open the gate on The Grim.