As literary power couple Ren and Helen Davis began crafting their new book on Oakland Cemetery, they discovered that with each changing season came new life, if you will, and they wanted to capture the beauty they saw. The result is "Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide" ($24.95), just released by the University of Georgia Press.
"The way the different light would reflect off the monuments and architecture along with the varied foliage, to us, was just stunning," Helen Davis said from her home in the Brookhaven/Dunwoody area.
"But we also wanted the book to be a companion guide when touring the cemetery as the stories about the epitaphs and their meanings and symbolism are just fascinating," said Davis' husband, Ren.
The two worked as a team, with Helen scouting the locations and Ren taking the photographs. They both executed countless hours of research, combing through Oakland's files as well as the city of Atlanta's where they discovered rare maps and archival images included in the book.
Q: Share some unique stories you learned while doing the book.
Ren: We learned that Margaret Mitchell's publisher for many years had tulips planted on her grave. We learned about Judge Logan Bleckley, who was from the mountains of northeast Georgia, barely made it out of school before the Civil War and eventually became the chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When he died, he had a stone from his home on Screamer Mountain brought to the cemetery, and it was used as his grave marker.
Helen: The story of Margaret Mitchell is that her publisher had bulbs sent from Holland to Oakland Cemetery each year so that she would have tulips surrounding her grave site.
Ren: Probably one of the most interesting things is that at the grave site of Bobby Jones the golfer: Golfers from all over the world will make a pilgrimage to his grave and leave golf balls or some sort of golf paraphernalia on his grave as a tribute and in hopes for good luck with their golf game. At any given time when you visit his grave, you'll see dozens and dozens of golf balls or you may see a golf club.
Q: What are some eye-catching things in the cemetery that people might not expect to see?
Ren: What struck us when we first walked through were the enormous variety of monuments and the symbolism of them that tells the story of the people who are interred there. You may be surprised to come upon a very poignant epitaph, a humorous epitaph. There's a monument there that I almost every time do a double take every time I see it, and that's a very poignant monument for a woman who passed away in 2006. It's a monument of her in effigy and her husband sitting next to her so lovingly brushing her hair. It's the Fazzari-Landis family monument over in the Hog Pen Corner Greenhouse Valley area. It is so unusual. He had this monument put up as his eternal symbol of love for her.
Q: Why did you choose Oakland as your topic for this book?
Helen: Each year, Oakland celebrates the spirits of Halloween and does tours where people dress up as characters associated with Oakland Cemetery and perform skits for people in the evening. We were finishing one of those evenings where Ren and I were both spirits, which we had been doing since about 2007. We were talking about an idea that we had for a poster, and director Mary Woodlan said what the foundation really wanted was a coffee-table book. As we were both recently retired, we hopped on board.
Ren: So then we talked to Dr. Jamil S. Zainaldin, who is the director of the Georgia Humanities Council, and he happened to say that the University of Georgia Press had been interested in doing a book on Oakland. We began working with the press editor as early as 2010.
Helen: We started doing research in the Oakland archives and the Atlanta archives.
Ren: And we were blessed to have hundreds of volunteers [in particular, the tour guides] who do all sorts of things for the Oakland Foundation at our disposal.
Book launch reception and book signing
Free. 5-7 p.m. Sunday. Lion's Square, 248 Oakland Ave. S.E., Atlanta. 404-688-2107, www.oaklandcemetery.com.
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