MADISON, GA'S HISTORIC CEMETERIES
HISTORY
Ground Penetrating Radar survey Old Cemetery
1880s History of New Cemetery
Aerial photographs 1939-2019
1996 Uncovering of African American graves
Newspaper articles by the Cemetery Stewardship Commission
Newspaper articles from the past
The 5½-acre Old Madison Cemetery extends from the driveway entrance to the railway tracks, and downhill to Round Bowl Spring Park, the upper section comprised of Madison’s middle class and elite, and the lower section primarily burials of former slaves. Note that most of the burials here face east. The first building of Madison’s Episcopal Church of the Advent stood on the property near the entrance from 1853 to 1940. Click here for the Ground Penetrating Survey Report made in 2006 of a portion of this cemetery.
With the Old Cemetery “rapidly…being filled up,” in the early 1880s the City acquired 10 acres across the tracks for the New Cemetery. First, the remains of 54 Civil War dead were reinterred as a group closer to the tracks. The next and largest section was designated for “white people,” then a section for “colored people,” and lastly the “Potter’s field.”
Fairview Cemetery, an eight-acre tract, was purchased by the City in 1926. Divided from New Cemetery by a ravine, Fairview was chartered in 1904 as a perpetual care cemetery by early enterprising stockholders.
Madison Memorial Cemetery was also originally a for profit perpetual care cemetery - formerly known as Morgan Memorial Park, Inc., chartered in 1957. The City acquired the four acres in 1979, eliminated race-restrictive covenants and renamed it Madison Memorial.
An expansion of Madison’s City Cemeteries began in 2013/14 with the acquisition of 19 acres of land adjoining Fairview Cemetery. It will be the City’s first fully racially integrated cemetery.