Clay Cemetery Preservation

We wish you a wonderful day and invite you to partner with us in the care and feeding of Atlanta's historic Clay Cemetery, 42 Clifton Street NE, 30317. We have started our Fall fund raising with a goal of $5000 to carry us forward well into the coming New Year. Remember that your generous contribution goes far and is also fully tax deductible as Clay Cemetery Preservation is an IRS registered 501(c)3 non-profit. We deeply appreciate your ongoing support and the help you might offer again.

Cemetery care is a great deal different from your lawn at home. Mowing a 1/2 acre with more than 170 grave markers is much more than up and back. The stones require annual to biannual cleaning and regular inspection to preserve level and stability.  Tree care must be proactive to protect grave markers, historical fencing, and assure safety for all who visit us. We have been caring for the once abandoned Clay Cemetery since 2005 and have restored it from a fully overgrown and deteriorated space unrecognizable as a cemetery. 

Clay Cemetery is one of the finest and most intact examples of an Upland South Folk Cemetery remaining within the City of Atlanta. Few, if any, remain in Atlanta that so accurately represent the period from pioneer settlement to modern times in a relatively original state undisturbed by the surrounding growth of urban density. The cemetery evolved from a family burial ground in the mid 1800’s to become a middle and upper middle class neighborhood cemetery in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to ultimately contain approximately 200+ burials. It later became a burial ground for economically stressed and increasingly fragmented families during the collapse of the Southern economy in the 1920's and the Great Depression that followed in the 1930's. These changes are represented across time by a shift in markers from simple tablet stones to expensive and sometimes ornate Victorian and Edwardian gravestones to the homemade cement gravestones and rock markers of very low income southern burial practices. 

It was established c.1826 by the first documented Kirkwood settler, Jesse Clay, Sr. (1786-1871) and is 4/10 mile from "Wade's Place Hollow", the location of a spring serving first Indians, then pioneer travelers, then Clay family and other local settlers. Clay Cemetery is 400 feet from the original Atlanta to Decatur trolley line right of way (c.1870) and 1/4 mile from the early 20th Century industrial architecture of the N.P. Pratt Laboratory (c.1914) and that of the Pullman Railcar Company yard (c.1926). Documentation demonstrates that those buried in Clay Cemetery were employed in these and related industries, such as the railroads. That documentation also shows an evolution in workforce from agricultural pursuits in the middle 1800’s to light industry by the late 1800’s and culminating with heavy industrial employment during the early and middle 20th Century. 

Jesse Clay Sr. and family emigrated from Monticello, Jasper County, Georgia in 1826 with his wife, three sons, and daughter to settle in DeKalb County, Georgia and are the first documented pioneer settlers in the Kirkwood & Edgewood portion of Atlanta in Dekalb. He purchased Land Lots 206 (Edgewood) and 207 (Kirkwood) of the 15th District, DeKalb County from speculators Taylor & Watts of Jasper County that year and made the final payment by traveling to South Carolina and back by horseback. It is thought that he financed purchase of the properties through the sale of the ten slaves he owned in Monticello. He and his family initially lived on the property in a tent and drew water from a spring at Wade’s Place Hollow (noted above) while clearing the native hardwood forest and subsistence farming. The Clays never again owned slaves nor did they pursue a plantation agricultural model. Jesse and his son’s generation were cash poor land rich farmers who differed greatly from their more speculative neighbors who owned much larger parcels. His son Greenberry (1820-1886) later owned a large parcel adjoining to the southeast (including today's Kirkwood Urban Forest Preserve) which was operated as a dairy farm. Adjacent to it was a “Market Garden” operated by Jesse Clay Sr. grandson C.C. Clay.