Utoy Cemetery Association, Inc.
NewsletterVolume 1, Issue 02
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Ma j. Perry Bennett,President
Mr. T.J. White, V.P
Mr. Malcolm McDuffie, V.P
Mrs. Sarahlyn Bennett, Secretary
Mr. C.W. Strickland, Treasurer
Mr. Joseph P. Suttles, Chairman,
Board of Advisors
A private, tax-exempt
non-profit
dedicated to maintaining,
restoring and preserving
Atlanta’s oldest cemetery
Founded in 1816
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P. O. Box 42383, Atlanta, GA 30311-0383
Physical address: 1465 Cahaba Drive, SW, Atlanta, GA 30311
Telephone: 770-925-4299
Webpage:
Facebook page: Utoy Cemetery Association Inc
April, 2011
WELCOME:
This is the second issue of our Quarterly Newsletter. Again, we hope you find it informative and as always invite your suggestions and contributions to its content.
CEMETERY GROUNDS MAINTENANCE UPDATE:
The Association wishes to express our gratitude to Tyler Waldenfor February through April hard work and knowledge in construction, grounds maintenance, fence repair, chain saw operation and tree cutting expertise. You need to stop by the cemetery and take a look at the progress!!
UTOY CEMETERY 2010 VOLUNTEERS OF THE YEAR:
Major Perry Bennett, President, congratulates Malcolm and Maxine McDuffie for their efforts during 2010.
GIRLS SCOUTS MARCH 19th VISIT:
62 local Girl Scouts visited the Historic Utoy Cemetery at 5:00 on March 19th for a historic tour of the cemetery and the historic Utoy Church, which was a battlefield hospital during the Siege of Atlanta and Battle of Utoy Creek, GA.
APRIL 11TH BUSINESS MEETING
Pictured above from left to right:
FIRST ROW: Maxine McDuffie, Elder Joe Hildreth, Dr. I. M. Spence-Lewis, Dianese Howard
BACK ROW: Michael Mitchell, Malcolm McDuffie, Major Perry Bennett, Tyler Walden, Terry White, D. Gordon Draves
We were joined by representatives from the Westridge-Sandtown Community Organization to discuss community involvement in restoring the African-American graves and community awareness of the historic Utoy Cemetery, along with possible assistance in cemetery security and grant applications.
FUTURE EVENTS:
During June, 2011, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Division of Historical Preservation will conduct a final review of Utoy Cemetery's application to be included on the National Register of Historic Places. This DNR meeting is open to the public, and the specific time and place for this event will be provided via E-Mail as soon as itbecomes available.
The business meetings of the Association, as voted on at our March meeting, have been rescheduled to a quarterly basis. The next meetingwill be held on the second Monday of July (July 11th),at the American Legion Post 51 in East Point, Georgia, starting at 7:00 pm.
The Utoy Cemetery Open House will be held on August 6, 2011, with Elder Joe Hildreth conducting the service. Elder Hildreth is a former pastorof the Utoy Primitive Baptist Church. Details will be provided in the next Newsletter.
HISTORICAL TIDBIT:
Starting with this issue, we will be presenting short excerpts from the history of Utoy Primitive Baptist Church on which Terry White, one of our Vice Presidents (and Historian) has lately been working. Here follows one such excerpt. We hope that it finds an interested readership. The title of this forthcoming book is Utoy Primitive Baptist Church: a New History.
Barely a year later, in December 1822, DeKalb County was carved out of the northern portions of Henry and Fayette Counties, and also included a fringe of what had been the large Gwinnett County to the northeast. A new town, Decatur, named for a naval hero of the War of 1812, was established as the seat of the new county of DeKalb. This new county had itself been named for the Baron Johann De Kalb who had so ably assisted the Anglo-American colonies in their struggle for Independence. This new county of DeKalb included the area that later became Fulton County (in 1853), and of course included the Utoy Settlement and Utoy Church. For many decades around this time, Utoy settlement actually had its own post office, established in March 1836, and was thus a functioning town in most respects.
One of the first acts of the new DeKalb County government was to build a more direct route from the town of Decatur to what was now called Fort Gilmer and nearby Montgomery's Ferry. Again enlarging upon existing Indian trails, two new roads were constructed, including what was the first road to be built connecting lower DeKalb/Fulton to Decatur, and to the Peachtree Road. This new road was called the Sandtown Road, because it connected Decatur with the aforementioned Creek Indian village of Sandtown. Part of it is now called Cascade Road SW, one of the oldest in the area.
About halfway between Decatur and the village at Sandtown, a small hamlet began to form at the intersection of the Sandtown and Newnan Roads (now Cascade Road and Lee Street). In 1835, an enterprising man named Charner Humphries (1795-1848) had arrived from South Carolina, and built a two-storey, clapboard covered, whitewashed home with a two-storey front porch, that served as a tavern, inn, and residence for his large family. With the addition of a post office, "Whitehall" (as the hamlet was called, after the palace in England) became large enough to have its own political designation as an election district, and also served as the parade ground for the local militia company. It was later re-named “West End,” again, after a location in England.
In 1931, Atlanta historian Franklin M. Garrett and artist and writer Wilbur G. Kurtz paid a prescient visit to Jeremiah Silas Gilbert at his Atlanta home (see right, and following page), and fortunately recorded much of what the aged Mr. Gilbert had to say about the Whitehall Tavern, and about his grandfather Charner Humphries. Particularly worth quoting here are Mr. Gilbert’s comments (as filtered through Mr. Kurtz’s florid pen) about daily life at the Tavern and vicinity (in the 1840s and 1850s):
Muster day [of the local militia] was the big event at the tavern. This was an annual affair, where the yokelry of all the county districts were called together by the major commanding the militia. The functionary who held the county muster at Whitehall was Major Alexander Ratteree. The summons having been issued, the able bodied male citizens came trooping in, with their flint lock fowling pieces, and [were] usually primed for a frolic [i.e., slightly inebriated]. Many horses decorated the rack in front of the big white tavern. Actual drill in the manual of arms lasted about two hours, but this was only a beginning. Trials of marksmanship were then held, with a prize of a yearling cow to the winner. The cow—whoever won it—was then offered up as a sacrifice to the collective appetites of the assemblage, for it was straightway slaughtered, cooked and served, together with the accompanying comestibles [foods], all washed down by copious potations [beverages], not so poetic but more potent than “brown October ale”. Indeed the whiskey barrel was a common institution at such places. Charner [Humphries] kept one on tap in the rear of the store, where cash customers were entitled to drinks “on the house”, but it was considered good etiquette for strangers or occasional visitors, to leave a nickel or dime on the barrel head after imbibing.
Drilling, marksmanship and feasting were followed by more diverting entertainment. Most districts had a bully, or one gifted with alleged fistic prowess, and the day was counted lost if somebody didn’t get well pounded and bruised up in the ring—which was literally a ring of cheering and betting spectators, and not a squared circle of rope. Most everybody had a dog, and when all the pugilistic entries were either victors or vanquished, the canine belligerents were cheered on by the owners or partisans. That these dog battles were often extemporaneous detracted not one whit from the enjoyment of the crowd. The militia officers did not at all times retain the respect of the rural soldiery; Mr. Gilbert recalled that at one of the musterings the assembled militiamen, having taken umbrage at something said or done by Major Ratteree, ran him off the place.
On ordinary days the chief event was the arrival of the mail coach from Lawrenceville or Newnan. The tavern was a famous stop on this route. The four-horse team would dash up to the tavern; the driver would heave overboard the mail bags, and descend from his high seat, and impart the latest news to the foregathered denizens of the locality. Fresh horses were brought up from the stable to replace the tired animals that knew where the watering trough was located.
In addition to the extended Gilbert Family from South Carolina, which apparently had already resided in the area for several years, a large group of families migrated en masse from Franklin County, Georgia to what was then Dekalb County, arriving on November 27th 1822. These families included the Baker, Barge, Cash, Fain, Ferguson, Holbrook, Oliver, Peacock, Redwine, Smith, Stone, Suttles, and Willis families. Aged Revolutionary War veteran William Suttles led the large group. The Suttles family mostly settled in the area now known as the "Ben Hill" section of SW Atlanta, around the area where Mt. Gilead Methodist Church would be established two short years later. William Suttles himself, however, along with his wife, resided with his widowed daughter Margaret “Peggy” Willis, near her youngest son Joseph Willis Jr., in the neighborhood of Utoy Church and Willis’ Grist Mill. Other families, such as the Donehoo, Hendon, Holley, White, and Wilson families arrived shortly afterward.
As indicated above by the Reverend Cotter, this area was still a literal wilderness, and remained so for many decades, even after the growing community of European-origin settlers had begun to carve farmsteads out of the vast and seemingly never-ending hardwood forest. As mentioned, the first roads of these European-American settlers consisted initially of what had previously been the trading paths of the Muscogee and Cherokee. The State of Georgia quickly commissioned several new roads through the new territory, including one all the way from Augusta on the Savannah River, over to the Chattahoochee River, where sat the former Indian village of Sandtown. Prominent local citizens, including several now buried at Utoy Churchyard, were commissioned as “Road Commissioners” to supervise the construction of these new roads through what is now DeKalb and Fulton Counties. William Willis, Henry M. White, and Joel Herring were among the members of Utoy Church who served in this capacity. We will mention some of them later.
The first settlers of DeKalb County, including that portion which became Fulton in 1853, were (as Garrett informs us) a “plain people, primarily of English, Scotch and Irish descent.”
They came mostly from Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, particularly the latter. Some of the older northeastern counties of Georgia sent fairly large contingents of pioneers. Franklin County [see above] was quite prolific in this respect, furnishing many of the first families to settle in southwestern De Kalb, now southwestern Fulton County.
“For the most part,” Garrett says, continuing, “the pioneers were poor and meagerly educated, but were generally industrious and temperate, qualities needed in the wilderness they sought to conquer.”
Their original homes were usually log cabins, owner built and occupied. The unit of land ownership was, primarily, one land lot of 202 ½ acres, although holdings of two to five land lots were not rare and fractional holdings were numerous. The individual ownership of slaves was small. Possession of a dozen or more was the exception rather than the rule and the majority of the early citizens, down to the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, owned none, or at the most, one or two house servants. Large plantations, such as were known in the older East and Middle Georgia counties, did not exist in early De Kalb.
The newly-arrived settlers, being a God-fearing people, quickly established several churches in this area: Macedonia Primitive Baptist in DeKalb County, on July 30th 1823; Nancy Creek Primitive Baptist, Mt. Gilead Methodist, and Utoy Primitive Baptist in 1824, also in DeKalb County, though the latter two were in that portion which later became Fulton; Philadelphia Presbyterian, in what was then Fayette County—now Clayton County, in 1825; and Mt. Zion Methodist in what is now Fulton County in 1828. Many more soon followed. Scions of the same Gilbert family that originally worshipped at Utoy Baptist, later worshipped at Mt. Zion Methodist, and lie buried in the churchyard there.
ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP DUES, “FRIENDS OF UTOY” CONTRIBUTIONS, AND DONATIONS:
Membership dues are payable January, 2011 and delinquent March, 2011. See below for renewal information. We would appreciate your submitting your Annual Dues as soon as possible. “Friends of Utoy Cemetery” can also make $25 annual contributions to assist us in our efforts. Donations are accepted and appreciated anytime of the year. Thank You!
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UTOY CEMETERY ASSOCIATION, INC.
MEMBERS & FRIENDS RENEWAL
And DONATIONS
Name: ______
Name: ______
Address: ______
City: ______State: ___Zip code: ______
Home Phone: ______
Cell Phone: ______
Email Address: ______
Ancestor Buried at Utoy Cemetery: ______
Individual $25; Individual + Spouse $50; Student $10
Corporate-10 Employees or less $50.00; Corporate-11 Employees or more $75.00
Make check(s) payable and mail to:
Utoy Cemetery Association, Inc.
Charles Strickland-Treasurer
PO Box 91267
East Point, GA 30364-1267
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