LaGrange, Georgia

 Last week Trish and I were in LaGrange where I conducted the seventh week-long storytelling workshop to be held there in the historic Hills and Dales (Callaway) Estate.

On Saturday we had a field trip to the southwest side of town to visit the Mulberry Street Cemeteries.

The original part of the cemeteries is the Stonewall Jackson Confederate Cemetery, shown with markers behind the iron fence.  In 1863 LaGrange was chosen as a cemetery town by the Confederate military.  For two years those veterans who died in the local military hospitals were buried here.

Just beyond the west end of the fence, enslaved orderlies who worked in these hospitals were also buried. As time passed the large grassy lawn continued to be used as an African-American cemetery into the 1930’s.  Ground radar studies have located more than five hundred graves in this area, most of them not marked.

In this cemetery are buried Horace King and his son, Marshal Ney.  King was a skilled and well-known wooden bridge builder whose bridges were all over west Georgia and Alabama.  One of his surviving bridges is being restored to this site, adjacent to the Horace King Memorial markers, and will be incorporated into the Thread, LaGrange’s thirty-mile-long greenway in development.

After our visit to the cemeteries, we walked up town to visit the Troup County Archives Museum’s historic Georgia auto exhibit.