Walking down the streets of Alpharetta, Georgia, there’s a palpable sense of nostalgia and Southern charm.
Tucked away in the suburbs north of Atlanta, the town is filled with colonial-style mansions hidden by towering Georgia pines and hardwoods. Manicured golf courses thread themselves throughout the various neighborhood subdivisions. Despite the intense development and population growth in recent years, neighbors here still smile warmly and wave at every passerby, even strangers.
But, just below the picturesque surface, there is a story half-forgotten for generations: the story of the enslaved people who likely lived and died in this community, whose unmarked graves today remain hidden beside a golf course.
A few steps from my home in Alpharetta, there is an abandoned cemetery containing scores of overgrown plots covered in pine straw and marked with fieldstones. It used to be called Bethlehem Cemetery. Based on interviews with local historians and previously unreported historical records, it is likely that some of these graves belong to enslaved persons.
This discovery raises difficult questions for the Alpharetta community, cited as one of Southern Living’s top 10 “Cities on the Rise” in the South. This part of Georgia has long maintained that it opposed secession and largely resisted the practice of slavery. This cemetery may indicate otherwise.
A Stray Mention
Bethlehem Cemetery sits hidden behind a copse of trees in the corner of Windward, an upscale planned community. There is no memorial or explanatory signage like one would find at official historic sites, and no acknowledgement that enslaved people are buried there.
Neither the City of Alpharetta’s website nor the Alpharetta Historical Society’s website mentions Bethlehem. Only two articles available on the internet refer to it, and only one of those, published in a local Alpharetta paper, mentions the possibility of graves of enslaved people.
A quick look at the readable grave markers establishes that Bethlehem is an Antebellum grave site. The earliest grave in the plot is dated to 1845, belonging to an infant. Multiple graves predate the Civil War. At least one Confederate soldier, Stephen D. Tribble, is buried there.
Fieldstones are placed methodically throughout the grave plots – rounded stones that are half-buried and stand neatly in rows, as if they are vernacular tombstones. In the context of Antebellum grave sites in Georgia, such fieldstones are considered potential markers of the graves of enslaved persons, according to a report by Georgia researchers and archaeologists at New South Associates.
But there are more direct links between Bethlehem and the institution of slavery.
The cemetery belonged to a church called Bethlehem Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MEC), according to Tim Spruell, a local historian who initially noted the possibility of enslaved persons’ graves there. Spruell shared that the denomination itself was founded in a high-profile schism in the Methodist Church over slavery.
In the 1840s, a Methodist bishop inherited enslaved persons from his wife and kept them as property, Spruell explained. The Methodist Church censured the bishop at its 1844 General Conference based on the denomination’s “well-known sentiments against a slaveholding Bishop,” according to official church records. The censure “upset Southern Methodists,” Spruell said, who formed the breakaway Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1845, which tolerated slavery.
Bethlehem MEC is one such church, and slave owners attended there, Spruell said. The church declined in the 1920s and splintered in 1932. The church building no longer exists, but the cemetery remains.
Perhaps the strongest link between Bethlehem and slavery is found in the “Slave Schedule” for Milton County – the former county where Alpharetta’s was located – from 1860. The federal census required each county in Georgia to enumerate its enslaved population, and each county prepared a “Slave Schedule” that listed the name of owners, the number of enslaved persons each owned, and the characteristics of the enslaved persons.
The Slave Schedule lists the family names of at least three enslavers – Shirley, Webb, and Smith – that also appear on family graves in Bethlehem. Shirley owned one, the two Webb men owned three and ten, and the Smith men owned one, one, and ten enslaved persons, respectively, according to the Slave Schedule.
These family names are familiar to anyone who lives in Alpharetta today. They are names of streets, neighborhoods, and even schools. I attended Webb Bridge Middle School, and Shirley Estates is a planned subdivision just down the street from Bethlehem. According to Spruell, this and other evidence establish that Bethlehem contains the graves of enslaved persons.
Another local expert said Bethlehem shares some of these key hallmarks of slave graves. Its plots appear to be predominantly organized by family name, and various fieldstone markers are placed among the family clusters. Family cemeteries will often have “slave burials in a section of it,” according to Meredith Clapper, a volunteer with the Georgia Tombstone Transcription Project, a group that preserves and restores grave sites throughout the area.
Minimizing the Local History of Slavery
In recounting the city’s history as it developed a local history museum, the city council approved an exhibit that claimed that “few farmers depend on enslaved workers” in this county and that Milton County “voted against Georgia’s secession from the United States.” Georgia’s secession resulted from “[l]arge, slave-holding counties [that] overruled Milton’s opposition.”
Local historians have found few mentions of enslaved persons in newspaper reports at the time. Meredith Clapper has “only run across a few mentions in the Cherokee Advance [local Georgia newspaper in the 1800s] about any non-white deaths … So far, the former slave would have to be extremely old or very beloved to be mentioned in that newspaper,” she noted.
But this anti-slavery account appears to be incomplete or inaccurate, according to historians and a review of slavery-era records. The 1860 Slave Schedule discloses that there were 617 enslaved persons in Milton County, Georgia, out of a population of 4,260 – over 10% of the population.
Memory and Justice
Communities across Georgia and the U.S. have similarly discovered the graves of enslaved persons and are grappling with the complex issues of memory and justice they present.
In 2020, two Clemson University students raised awareness about more than 215 unmarked graves of enslaved people discovered on school property. This sparked the Woodland Cemetery Historic Preservation Project, a preservation effort. Ground penetrating radar has been performed, there are new pathways throughout the cemetery so no graves are stepped on, and new benches will be built soon.
Just a few miles away from Alpharetta, the City of Johns Creek is debating how to respond to the discovery of formerly enslaved people’s remains at Macedonia Cemetery. Local activists and leaders are advocating for further action to preserve it. The City used eminent domain to acquire the cemetery property, but in the words of Kirk Canaday, one of those working to preserve the cemetery, “When [the City] say[s] ‘preserve,’ all they do is go up there and blow a few leaves around, but that’s about it.”
Canaday believes cities should be doing more. “The City has, I think, come to the point that they need to have a committee of families and state officials to determine how best to handle that cemetery.”
I contacted Todd Jones, the Georgia Assembly representative for the Alpharetta area, about the state’s responsibility towards these remains and potential legislative action. He did not respond to my request for comment.
Community leaders expressed concern that limited measures to preserve physical burial sites — such as fencing them off — do nothing to preserve their history.
“Cemeteries hold a lot of value based on culture,” says Canaday.
These cemeteries have a “spiritual voice,” he said, and hold traces of important traditions and customs, especially those belonging to Black communities. Even the alignment of fieldstones in some cemeteries has deep meaning: while they may appear scattered to laypeople, the graves are arranged so that the buried person is pointed toward the East, so they can face the rising sun on Resurrection Day. Traditions like these are the vestiges of a history that leaders believe is being lost.
Canaday argues that the City of Alpharetta should create a committee, identify if a grave belongs to an enslaved person, and locate any descendants. However, other communities have found that this is not always possible. At Clemson University’s Woodland Cemetery, many of the graves remain unidentified. But they have formed a committee that attempts to identify the buried and find their descendants.
I asked Alpharetta’s mayor, Jim Gilvin, whether our city should prioritize identifying and preserving the potential graves of enslaved persons, including those at Bethlehem. “As a former Windward resident, I am well aware of Bethlehem Cemetery and have walked it several times myself over the years,” the Mayor said in an emailed statement. He has now asked the City Administrator, who is an expert on Alpharetta cemeteries, to “look into the possibility of creating a historical marker for the site.”
Even a small act of remembrance can be meaningful. “There’s a saying that a person dies twice,” Canaday says. “Once when they physically die, and the second … when they’re not remembered.”
