Though I will always be of Wilson, I have lived in Atlanta for most of my adult life. It is very much “home” for me, too, and is a bottomless well of African-American culture and history that often informs the way I process research and works related to Black Wide-Awake and Lane Street Project.
I’ve begun visiting metro Atlanta’s historic African-American burial grounds. How have they weathered exploding population growth, shifting demographics, outmigration, land loss, and other pressures? The fifth in a series — Basket Creek Baptist Church Cemetery, Douglas County.
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Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2009, Basket Creek Cemetery is singular in all of Georgia as the only documented burial ground with grave mounding, a practice with roots in West Africa. Per Wikipedia, the cemetery is classified as Southern Folk-style, with mounded graves, scraped ground, a hilltop location, east-to-west grave orientation, grave markers and decorations made with local materials (not commercially sold), certain types of vegetation, grave shelters, family plots, wife-to-the-left burials, and evidence of a devotion to God and/or family in the form of memorials.


Basket Creek Cemetery is astonishing in the very best sense of the word. Here are excerpts from the National Register nomination form:




Thomas J. Beadles Died Mar. 3, 1903 Aged 63 Yrs.

Thomas S. Endsley D. This Life March 17 1903

John T. Colclough Oct. 3, 1837 Oct. 7, 1914


“Simpson” Mr. William H. Endsley 5.10 1851 7.17 1923 (an Eldren Bailey headstone made for Simpson Funeral Home well after Endsley’s death)

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, April 2026.















