Q Corners
Hardman Cemetery
by David Raney
Though roughly the size of a tennis court, it hides in plain sight, easy to miss amid Emory’s sprawling new Clairmont Campus. On a wooded rise between a child care center, a dormitory and an 1,800-car parking deck some call “Garaj Mahal” lies a small cemetery that holds the remains of some of the area’s first residents of European descent. Hardman Cemetery has occupied this land since before there was a Clairmont Road (then called Shallowford Trail) or an Atlanta (founded 1837), or an Emory College, chartered at Oxford a decade after the first body was laid to rest here. Emory’s main campus, just two miles distant, was still almost a century away.
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The spot is both eerie and peaceful in the way of such places, particularly on a fall day with crisp leaves scraping the ground and flattening against ornate ironwork. Graves have been dated from 1825 to 1909, with markers ranging from full headstones with perfectly chiseled script to half-buried fragments bearing partial names (“Mc”) to mute, rain-dissolved stones, either never inscribed or entirely erased.
A surprisingly deep history swirls around this quiet little enclave. In 1825, Naman Hardman acquired the property under a treaty that had recently opened Creek and Cherokee land to white settlers. A year later he deeded two acres for a cemetery and meeting house, which served the Primitive Baptist Church until that congregation relocated in 1852.
The upheavals of the 1860s marked America forever, and Atlanta’s fiery role in that conflict has been well documented in history and film. Less well known, except to true Civil War buffs, is that General William Tecumseh Sherman headquartered near this cemetery for a single night before the Battle of Atlanta in a house owned by James Oliver Powell—and then burned Hardman’s meeting house to the ground when he left on the infamous March to the Sea.
Dr. Richard Sams 57C, a geologist and historian, is related to both Powell and Hardman and has studied the area’s history extensively. (His novel Atlanta Is Ours plays out the what-if premise that Confederate forces captured Sherman that night.) Sams thinks Sherman may have torched the meeting house not out of spite but for sanitary reasons. His men had used the building as a barracks and field hospital, and fear of disease was paramount during a conflict in which many more soldiers died of smallpox and dysentery than by musket or minie ball.
Some of those soldiers almost certainly remain here in unmarked graves, as do two, possibly four, slaves. No one is quite sure. Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett surveyed the site in 1930 and listed twenty-two marked graves among numerous others. A 1985 survey raised the number of sites to twentyseven, and more recently Sams has tentatively identified an additional fourteen with only “uninscribed, almost buried, headstones and footstones.”
Upkeep of the cemetery was sporadic, left to volunteers, for many years before Emory purchased the surrounding property in 1986 for graduate student housing. The land had passed from the Hardmans to the Powells to the Houston family in the late nineteenth century and was maintained by descendants well into the twentieth, but by the 1970s it had fallen into disrepair, victim of vandals and time. Two Eagle Scout clean-up projects, and periodic visits from local residents, descendants and the DeKalb Historical Society have since removed weeds and dying trees and added temporary crosses and a sign. When the Emory campus opened in 2003 with apartments, classrooms and a sparkling new student center, the cemetery took its incongruous place among the glass walls and passing buses and landscaped grounds.
It can be a continuous source of amazement to think how few generations link epochal events in our still-young country. When Naman Hardman was born in 1784, America had just finished separating bloodily from Britain and did not yet have a Constitution. When the youngest of his thirteen children died in 1920, the world had survived a Great War and Ronald Reagan was nine years old.
There’s another way to see Hardman Cemetery as emblematic of America’s history as well as Emory’s. In 1905 Major Washington J. Houston and his wife Amanda, whose name survives in nearby Houston Mill (Quadrangle Spring 08), built a chapel near the cemetery to replace Hardman’s church. After 1928 it became home to their grandson’s caretaker, a Baptist minister named Ernest Moore, who was given the simple structure to live in until his death. By the time Rev. Moore passed in his mid-nineties, Emory had begun the planning process for the Clairmont facility, with a shuttle route to the main campus that would pave over the “springs west of the Meeting House” (used for baptisms) that Naman Hardman included in his original deed. But as Richard Sams pointed out recently, those springs still flow. Unseen beneath the shuttle road, they empty finally into Lullwater Pond, neatly symbolizing, along the way, the kind of permanence that can underlie even great change.