American Lives

On the northern edge of Frankie Allen Park, at the south-east corner of Pharr Road NE and Bagley St NE, lies a small, semi-abandoned burial ground which is known as Mount Olive Cemetery.

The cemetery sits atop the shrub-covered mound between the road and the parking lot, covering just 0.22 acres or 0.09 hectares of land. Few park visitors recognize the history behind the local landscape, and even fewer know there is a cemetery here. This site helps to tell the story of a community which was erased by the thinly-veiled racism of mid-century Atlanta.

Mount Olive Methodist Episcopal Church once stood alongside the cemetery, having been founded in 1870 by recently-freed enslaved persons who became tenant farmers, gardeners at local golf clubs, truck drivers, shoe-shiners, nurses, cotton mill-workers and domestic servants to white families in what would come to be known as Buckhead.

In 1921 a white developer by the name of John Owens built the Macedonia Park subdivision, which quickly became a thriving, self-contained Black community with more than four hundred residents.

In 1929, William Bagley purchased six lots at what is now the park. Earlier in his life, he and his family had been driven from his Forsyth County farm of eighty-four acres (thirty-four hectares) during the infamous removal of Black people in 1912.

Bagley was known as the unofficial 'mayor' of the area since he was an educated man and a leader, someone who was striving to create a model Black community. It has been said that he operated a grocery store in the area.

Although the developer, Owens, had wanted to formally name the area Macedonia Park, it was known as Bagley Park by the locals. By the 1940s, however, white neighborhoods such as Garden Hills had surrounded Macedonia Park.

Residents of these neighborhoods petitioned the board of Fulton County Commissioners to seize and tear down all of the houses of their Black neighbors, citing slum-like and unsanitary conditions. This aligned perfectly with the county's initiative to create more parkland in the Atlanta area.

Over the next decade, families were forced out of Macedonia Park through 'eminent domain', which allows US governments to take private property and convert it to public use, as long as they provide compensation to those who lose out.

Coercive persuasion was also used. The homes were demolished and a park was laid out. The final burials seem to have taken place in 1945.

In 1952, the City of Atlanta created Bagley Park on the site, with grill and picnic pavilions, tennis courts, and Little League baseball fields. In 1980, the Bagley name was removed from the park when it was renamed Frankie Allen Park, after an umpire and volunteer at the home of 'Buckhead Baseball'.

The small creek which would have served the Black community still flows on the park's western border. Today the cemetery provides the only surviving remnant of this lost Macedonia Park community, and even that is incomplete.

The cemetery was largely ignored by the residents of Buckhead, gradually falling into a state of abandonment. No one is certain of the exact number of burials here, since most graves are unmarked.

A survey in 2005 by TRC Garrow Associates Inc not only delineated the cemetery's boundaries, it also identified forty-five surviving burials, but the actual number is probably much higher. Only a few of those forty-five are marked by headstones.

In 2009, Brandon Marshall, a real estate developer, purchased the land which contains the cemetery, site unseen. Fulton County had perhaps mistakenly categorized it as 'vacant', and when no taxes were paid on it they sold it at public auction.

When he learned he had just bought a cemetery, Marshall planned to remove and relocate all of the bodies, claiming that the current location was overgrown, and they would be better off elsewhere. He wanted to build condominiums on the site (apartment buildings).

Fortunately his plans were halted by a lawsuit which was filed by Elon Butts Osby, Bagley's granddaughter. Osby was represented pro bono by Wright Mitchell, an attorney and the founder of Buckhead Heritage.

The relationship between Osby and Buckhead Heritage has delivered significant attention to Mt Olive Cemetery over the past decade. A number of entities have now stepped up to help, including local arborists, architectural historians, and conservators.

Some small-scale preservation work has taken place over the years, and regular clean-up days which are hosted by Buckhead Heritage - along with Atlanta International School - help to keep the site from becoming overgrown again.

The cemetery still awaits a long-term maintenance plan to target tree care and erosion control, as well as interpretive signage to help educate visitors to the park.

In November 2022, Mayor Andre Dickens signed legislation which restored the name 'Bagley' to the park. The city council had unanimously passed the legislation.

News of the name's restoration has been celebrated in Atlanta as a way of honoring a past which has almost completely been erased.