Fall was gone. In the morning, the stones were cold to the touch. So were the plants, and that wouldn’t do.
Some walked to the burial ground on the edge of town. Others came on horseback, or rode in wagons that creaked until they stopped where green field and white marble came together. They collected the potted plants that had adorned the tombs of loved ones, then stored them in the greenhouse. There they'd stay until spring returned, when the sun again warmed the stones at Oakland Cemetery.
That greenhouse is gone. After 40 years, another is taking its place. When it’s complete next month, a segment of the cemetery’s past will bloom again.
Workers are preparing the site where an earlier greenhouse stood. When they are finished, an aluminum-and-glass structure will rest inside the brick-wall remains of the building it’s replacing. Oakland estimates the project, from site preparation to heating the structure, will cost about $200,000.
The greenhouse is a gift from the Buckhead Men's Garden Club. It's coming, one truckload at a time, from the Atlanta History Center.
The history center is moving the greenhouse to accommodate a building project of its own, the Cyclorama. The famed painting of the Battle of Atlanta is relocating from Grant Park, whose borders nearly bump against the cemetery.
Call it a historic tit-for-tat.
“You’ve got the Cyclorama moving to the history center. You’ve got the greenhouse coming here,” said Neale Nickels, Oakland’s director of preservation. “It’s great for the Cyclorama, great for the history center, great for us.”
It is a great arrangement, agreed Rich Dunville, president of the Buckhead club that agreed to donate the greenhouse. “We’re grateful that Oakland’s taking it.”
He also thinks it’s fitting for a Buckhead structure to move to the Grant Park area. After all, Grant Park is giving up something, too.
“It seems very poetic,” he said. “It seems as if everything has come together.”
Hints of the past
A mid-day sun peeked through the second-floor windows of Oakland’s main office. It illuminated a handful of aged items — rusted nails, some equally decayed screws, a canister the size of a poker chip. The earthen floor of the old greenhouse surrendered them during a dig earlier this year.
The diggers, most of them anthropology students from Georgia State, discovered the stuff you’d expect in a graveyard. The nails? Probably used to seal coffins; the screws likely served the same purpose. But that odd little canister? It probably held breath lozenges, Nickels said.
“It’s the Victorian version of Altoids.”
The first greenhouse was from that era. Described in records as a "hothouse," it was built in 1872. It rose on a 23.5-acre plot that Lemuel P. Grant, the man for whom the nearby park is named, sold to Atlanta for its rapidly growing cemetery.
A year later, Oakland’s caretaker, or sexton, approached the Atlanta City Council and asked to enlarge the hothouse. An Atlanta Constitution reporter noted that the new structure was triple in size to its predecessor.
In 1900, another greenhouse rose in the cemetery. It remained operating until the early 1970s, when a storm walloped the aging building, destroying windows blowing away aged wood. That left four brick walls — the only reminder of Oakland’s horticultural past.
The replacement greenhouse. built of aluminum and tempered glass, is 30 feet wide and 50 feet long. Oakland officials wondered if it would fit inside the old walls. It would, they discovered, but barely: On two sides, the new greenhouse would fit with an inch to spare.
“When we saw that, we knew,” said Sara Henderson, the cemetery’s director of gardens. “What else could we use that space for?”
Officials want to hold workshops under its glassed ceiling, and plans a small “interpretive center” on the grounds just outside, Henderson said.
“This,” she promised, “will be a working greenhouse.”
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