Talbotton Forgotten Cemetery, an abandoned sacred place in a forest

@ElentirENG ES 2·25·2024 · 22:28 0

I have been publishing articles about cemetery explorations for years and today's is one of the ones that made me the most sad when I saw it.

The not-so-fake tomb of Ebenezer Scrooge, the character from Charles Dickens' story
The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the reason for its strange and fascinating appearance

Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, with the approval of the Third Amendment to the Constitution of that country, after a bloody war that pitted the northern and southern states largely against each other. This question. As a curiosity, the then British province of Georgia was the first of the Thirteen Colonies of North America to prohibit slavery in 1735, despite being the last of the Thirteen to be established. A royal decree legalized slavery there again in 1751.

In Georgia, slavery was closely linked to cotton crops. In 1861, Georgia voted in favor of secession and joined the Confederate States, which sought to maintain slavery in force. One of the slave-owning farms in that state belonged to the family of Charles Lee Smith in Talbotton, Talbot County.

The Smiths created their own cemetery next to their plantation, where both their family members and their slaves were buried. After the abolition of slavery, that cemetery continued to house burials of African Americans, until very recently (around the year 2000). A month ago, the YouTube channel "Sidestep: Adventures Into History" p< strong>published a video showing this cemetery, mostly abandoned and in poor condition, despite its large size: there are about a thousand burials there:

You can see below some screenshots from the video, in which you can see anonymous graves, some of them already broken and fallen trees over burial sites. Here we see a common tomb of members of the same family:

Some graves belong to veterans of both world wars. George Hill fought in the US Army in World War II. He died in 1968 and this is his tombstone:

The gravestone of Charles Henry Smith, another World War II veteran. It is very sad to see a grave of a war veteran in these conditions.

One of the most recent tombs in the cemetery, where James Walton, US Navy veteran, born in 1920 and died in 1990, is buried.