Artists and historians collaborate to bring hidden stories to life in Hapeville

And the vision of the town’s past offered up at its history museum is different, too. The Hapeville Depot Museum, in a former train depot built in 1890, is a definitive break from tradition. Events, lectures and openings at the museum attract a vibrant mix of races and ages, and the museum’s programming is inventive and illuminating.

The museum’s permanent exhibitions tell the hidden stories of Hapeville.

“Civil Rights and Workers Rights: An Exhibit of Hapeville’s Atlanta Assembly Plant” explores the plant’s integration by Black workers. “Of Men and Mules: Convict Leasing in Quarries of the New South” examines the use of prisoners as forced labor. It was funded in part with a grant from the National Center for Civil and Human Rights

Credit: Hapeville Depot Museum

Credit: Hapeville Depot Museum

That dynamic approach to history is the result of a curatorial strategy engineered by museum director Samantha Singleton, who combines artists and historians to tell these secret histories in new ways.

Instead of copious wall text, the museum uses artists’ renditions of historical truths to open an emotional portal to feeling and experiencing history. For an exhibit on Plunkett Town, a predominately Black neighborhood that was bulldozed in 1970 to make way for an airport expansion, textile artist Camisha Bulter was commissioned to create a tapestry weaving in photos of former residents as “a memorial to all these different families that used to live in Plunkett Town,” Singleton said.

“I feel like when we just use artifacts and census records and wall text, what we’re missing sometimes is mood, a sense of place, the feeling of people’s history being lost and, really, just the empathy that we should have when we’re trying to understand people’s histories,” she said.

Using artists also allows Singleton to work around a deficit of official records (especially where abuse, racism or violence were present) in some cases. For her Hapeville Depot Museum project, Paulette Richards, who served as both historian and artist, told the story of how the area used convicts to mine local quarries in the 19th and early 20th century. It’s a history Richards recounts via a video on view in the museum using her own music and puppets that tell the story of this exploited labor force.

Credit: Hapeville Depot Museum

Credit: Hapeville Depot Museum

“What she’s providing is a sense of psychological safety for our guests (so) they can engage in this very intense history but still feel safe at the museum,” Singleton said.

Sitting behind an enormous wooden desk, with a wall of vintage glass telephone pole insulators displayed behind her, Singleton explains her curatorial modus operandi at this sprawling museum in one of the oldest remaining train depots in Georgia. It’s a space that feels like a cross between a community center, a well-curated vintage shop and a history museum sprinkled with Singleton’s unique pixie dust of creativity and truth telling. She has created a community-centric mashup of visual art and local history unlike any other art space in Atlanta, in part inspired by her own studies in art and history at Smith College.

For the past two years Singleton has facilitated the museum’s telling of Hapeville’s secret histories with permanent exhibitions that pay homage to the many unsung heroes who have defined the area’s industrial, blue collar past.

“You know, we take our road systems, our rail systems, for granted,” she said. “Who constructed all of this? How did it come to be? I try my best to think about, who are we forgetting in the story? Who is missing? Because it just doesn’t make sense. It keeps me up at night.”

Her questions are at the core of the museum’s exhibits.

The New Jersey native is a proud resident of the Tri-Cities (specifically East Point), a triumvirate of southside Atlanta neighborhoods experiencing various degrees of success with gentrification, though none has demonstrated the level of dedication to incorporating art and artists into the community like Hapeville has. It is home to the Atlanta Printmakers Studio on Virginia Avenue, the Goat Farm’s Hapeville artist studios and numerous public art projects. And one of its city council members, Chloe Alexander, is a working artist. Hapeville has leaned into its quaintness without shilling an archaic vision of a more wholesome past — thanks in part to work like Singleton’s.

After graduating from Smith, Singleton spent a few years caring for her father, who had Alzheimer’s. Then she cut her teeth on deep historical research at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York, where she created an archive of correspondence and photos related to the Hudson River School painter.

Right before the pandemic she moved to Atlanta, attracted by the city’s art scene and her love of history. She eventually found work at the city of Roswell’s Historic House Museums as an educator leading tours of bastions of the Southern aristocracy like Bulloch Hall, the childhood home of Teddy Roosevelt’s mother, Mittie Bulloch.

Singleton has always loved a good story and got plenty of practice spinning a yarn while working in Roswell, where she specialized in historic mic drops. One of her favorites was the story of the Bulloch family nanny, Nancy Jackson, who used a family trip to Connecticut as a chance to sue for her freedom from slavery. In answer to white visitors to the Bulloch historic home who often asked Singleton if the family’s slaves were treated well, she shared details like the cyanide pill sewn into Jackson’s dress in case the legal case didn’t go her way.

Singleton found that when she told the truth — the story inside the story — it quite literally paid off. “People love hearing gripping stories. Also, it’s lucrative. Any time I really told this story, I got crazy tips.”

Singleton has been in the business of interpreting the world since childhood. She became an expert storyteller growing up helping her father — who was blind by the time she was born — see Picasso’s “Guernica” or the pyramids of Giza or movies through her narration (a habit that makes her very aware she is now “that girl” in movie theaters).

She’s made a comparable effort at the Hapeville Depot Museum.

Singleton strives to achieve a sense of empathy by using vintage posters, artifacts, sound recordings and news clips that make history more accessible and relatable.

Navigating the creaking, ancient wooden floors of the depot, Singleton points out crude sketches of three men — it’s “hobo code” — inked onto the 19th century wall’s wooden lath. The hidden artwork was the inspiration for “Boxcar Glyphs: Art and Signifiers on the Rails,” the museum’s upcoming examination of hobo art and train jumping that starts with programming in October before the exhibit’s debut in February 2026.

“I don’t need to tell people what to think or how to think. That’s not my job at all,” said Singleton of her goal for excavating history. “What I can do is lay out the facts and allow people to decide for themselves what they’re ready for, what they want to take, what they want to leave. Hopefully you’re going to leave changed or different or have a new perspective.”

IF YOU GO

Hapeville Depot Museum. Exhibits on view include “Civil Rights and Workers Rights: An exhibit of Hapeville’s Atlanta Assembly Plant,” “Of Men and Mules: Convict Leasing in Quarries of the New South” and “Plunkett Town History.” Free. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. 620 S. Central Ave., Hapeville. 404- 669-2175, hapevilledepot.org