Athens GA

Lane Street Project: inspiration out of Athens, Georgia.

If Lane Street Project had an inspo board, these images would be tacked across the top. 

I drove over to Athens yesterday to listen to UGA students talk about their semester’s work storymapping the families of historic Brooklyn Cemetery.

Linda Davis founded Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery in 2006. She’s part of the descendant community, and I look forward to speaking with her soon and tapping into her wisdom and wealth of experience.

I tried to visit the cemetery before the talk started, but it’s accessed from the parking lot of a church, and I didn’t know where the gates were or what the rules were around visitation. There are several cemeteries I want to visit in the Athens area, so I’ll see it next trip. 

I sat on the front row near the students, and I overheard several of them mention “my family.” I was briefly thrown as all but two of a dozen or so were white (just one is Black), and Brooklyn is an African-American cemetery. As they presented, however, it became clear that the students identify very closely with the particular families they were assigned to research. 

Each StoryMap used the same design layout. For each family, researchers included an introduction, a family tree, a map tour of the gravesites, a timeline and map tour of addresses significant to the family’s history, and a spotlight on one family member.

For example:

Project members acknowledged some of the limitations of their research.

(And a nod to Lyndon House Arts Center, which hosts sponsor Historic Athens’ monthly programming.)

Odd Fellows, Vick, and Rountree Cemeteries don’t have a major research university in their backyard, but East Carolina and North Carolina State Universities aren’t far away. Odd Fellows is perfect for this kind of storymapping project, and I am exploring ways to make it happen. (Including maybe taking an intro GIS course myself.) 

See more of Community Mapping Lab’s work in and around Athens, including the Brooklyn Cemetery, here.

Podcast recommendation, no. 3: Hot Corner.

I’m not podcasting, but if I were, Hot Corner, www.cornerhistories.com, would be a model.

Hot Corner is the historic commercial hub of Athens, Georgia’s African-American community. Much like the 500 block of Wilson’s East Nash Street, Hot Corner once buzzed day and night with Black-owned shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Over the span of six episodes, hosts Broderick Flanigan and Aleck Stephens explore Athens’ racial dividing lines and “what Black communities have built in the spaces between.” Find Hot Corner wherever you listen to podcasts.

Lane Street Project: honoring those who honor.

Had I known, I’d have been among the hundred people who gathered last week at Athens, Georgia,’s Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery to honor extraordinary 19th-century quilter Harriett Powers.

“Something’s got to be done,” thought Sandy Benjamin-Hannibal, one of the two women who set in motion the idea for a permanent memorial to Powers. Something has got to be done. Kudos to Benjamin-Hannibal and Peggy Hartwell and thanks to all — with Lane Street Project and in cemeteries across this country — who are similarly moved to reclaim the resting places, and thereby honor, our forgotten dead.

(Athens-Clarke County’s restoration of Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery received an Excellence in Rehabilitation Award from the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation in 2009 and suggests a model path for Wilson. I need to get over to Athens to pay my respects.)