‘It has consumed my life’

Somebody is buried here. But you wouldn’t know it from what you see.

There’s no headstone. The ground around the makeshift plot is hard and broken. Peeking through a patch of grass is a sliver of brickwork that covers the vault. If a gullywasher hit, the whole thing could vanish under rock and mud.

That’s the way it is in much of the Oak Ridge section of Rose Hill Cemetery, where Black men, women and children — many of whom were slaves — are buried. There are marble headstones there, but lots of them are in pieces. 

One Macon man, though, is trying to set things right, one plot at a time.

At daybreak one recent morning, Joey Fernandez pulled into Oak Ridge, his tow-behind trailer filled with the tools of his trade: shovels, hammers, clamps, epoxy, lime mortar, tarps, and a leaf blower among them. 

“Eighty percent of the monuments in here I can repair,” the 49-year-old said. “I don’t think anybody took me seriously until I started doing the work.”

It’s a labor of love that started innocently enough — as these things often do. Fernandez was driving near the Interstate 75/475 interchange one day when he saw a marker off the side of the highway. It piqued his interest. 

“All I saw was a sign that said Stokes Cemetery. … I went to the real estate company and asked if I could go look at it. They said they had moved it. I said ‘Let me check.’ ”

So he did. The site was overgrown and hadn’t been touched in years. It took him two days to get to it, hacking away at the dense brush.

There he found Civil War graves — and plenty more. Many of the markers were in pitiful shape.

“It upset me,” Fernandez said. “You realized that people were buried there. People prayed there, cried there. Loved ones … (I wondered), “Who’s gonna come out here and take care” of them? 

“I knew somebody had to be doing it. I started looking and I couldn’t find anyone. So I took it in my own hands, started spending my own money. I learned how to do it.

“From that moment on, it has consumed my life.”

He began driving to Savannah and taking classes on everything he could related to  grave-site repair, some of them with Jonathan Appell, a leading gravestone and monument preservationist.

Soon he began volunteering at Rose Hill, a cemetery park that opened in 1840 and was named for Simri Rose, who designed it.

Over time he showed what he could do and earned his stripes before he drew paying jobs, some of them from Historic Macon. He’s cleaned monuments. He’s repaired headstones. He’s re-pointed brickwork. He’s rebuilt entire burial plots that had collapsed.

Sometimes he’s “just had to puzzle the pieces together.”

It also took him awhile to gather the proper materials to work with that wouldn’t hurt the stones.

He uses lime mortar, for example, and not Portland cement for his repairs. That’s better for the stones and truer to the original work.

He even tries to match the size of the sand in particular mixes. One morning he was pulverizing marble chips into dust with a hammer so he could mix it with lime mortar to get the authentic look he wanted.

“No stone is the same,” he said. “I’m doing it the same way they would have back in the 1800s. The less you do to it, the better. 

“There’s a thousand of ’em in here that need work. It’s not just fixing it. It’s preserving it. You want to pass it along for future generations.”

One repair alone took him about 200 hours.

His passion and craftsmanship are evident to those who know and work with him.

"Joey is exactly the combination of expertise and enthusiasm that Rose Hill needs,” said Matt Chalfa, Historic Macon’s director of preservation field services. “I've had the opportunity to see him work both in the field making repairs and at various events as an advocate for the cemetery, and in both settings he is an invaluable partner for HMF as we work toward restoring this Macon landmark. 

“The local history and culture that reside in Rose Hill are in excellent hands. Joey is a true asset in preserving that heritage."

Now, the word is getting out about his skills and his company, Preserving our Georgia Cemeteries. He’s done work for Macon-Bibb County and other cities and counties across the state, as well as churches, veterans groups and preservation clubs. Earlier this year, Historic Macon honored him with a Preservation Award for his revitalization work.

Alpha Delta Pi officials have also reached out to him about restoring the brick wall at the site of the sorority’s founder, Eugenia Tucker Fitzgerald, who is buried in Rose Hill. (ADPi, as it’s commonly known, was founded at Wesleyan College in 1851.)

He’d also like to tackle the grave site of Joseph Bond, who is buried in the Holly Ridge section of Rose Hill. The large angel monument at the site, carved from Carrara marble, is one of the most well-known in the cemetery. Vandals and a tornado have taken their toll over the years, though, including a missing portion of the angel’s right arm. (Fernandez himself has found more than 50 scattered pieces of Connecticut brownstone that are missing from the site.)

He guesses that about half the damage at Rose Hill over the years has come from Mother Nature. The rest is from vandalism, theft or human error.  Cars have backed into statues along some of the narrow paths, he said, and contractors have also done their share of damage over time.

“A lot of people come here and never see the broken monuments,” he said. “And it’s been robbed of a lot of things.” Cast-iron fencing. Urns. Finials. Arms on statues. 

Rose Hill needs help, he said, but it has great potential as a tourist draw. It could use directional and exit signs at strategic points, and some of the small roads should be blocked off.

He calls Rose Hill “an untapped gem — one of the best things Macon has to offer” —  that too many folks take for granted.

Many people know about the Allman Brothers shrine, but the cemetery is full of Macon history that’s being lost to time.

With some work and better marketing, “more people will come here,” he said. Guided tours on weekends and more special events would help.

So would more folks joining the Friends of Rose Hill, which supports the cemetery’s work. (To do so, contact Historic Macon’s Matt Chalfa at mchalfa@historicmacon.org or (478) 742-5084, ext. 103.)

For now, Fernandez is doing what he can to make a difference, one grave site at a time. He knows, though, that he’ll never get to them all.

“I wish I had started this when I was young,” he said. “I had no idea. But I want to do as many of ’em as I can. I want to save the ones that are here before they’re gone.”

Ghosts of the past come rushing back

Social distancing — and disruption. The closing of schools, factories, small businesses and churches. Quarantines. Panic buying.

They’re all making the news these days, harkening back to the so-called “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918.

An estimated 30,000 Georgians died from it. All told, about 675,000 Americans succumbed, most of them young adults 20 to 40 years old. Worldwide death estimates range from 50 million to 100 million — many of them soldiers, in trenches and barracks. 

An emergency hospital in Kansas during the 1918 influenza epidemic. (National Museum of Health and Medicine)

Back then there were no vaccines, antibiotics, ventilators or electron microscopes. Health officials could not test people with mild symptoms so they could self-quarantine. There was little protective equipment for health-care workers. And it was almost impossible to trace contacts, since this particular strain of H1N1 flu seemed to engulf entire communities so quickly.

The outbreak came in waves. The first one hit that spring. The second, in the fall, was the most deadly. (Health officials are worried about that prospect now in the face of our current circumstances.)

In all, a half-billion people were infected — about a third of the world’s population at the time. One estimate says the virus infected up to a quarter of the American population of about 103 million people.

Safety guidelines from Illustrated Current News (National Library of Medicine)

It was a silent foe for months. In the early days, many folks didn’t take it seriously. Back then, authorities “didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know what to do and, therefore, they did the human thing, which is to say it’s not happening,” Dr. Alfred Crosby says in his book “America’s Forgotten Pandemic.” Then people started dying.

In Georgia, the flu wave hit Camp Hancock near Augusta in early October. Recruits received physicals, then were sent off to crowded training camps for later deployment to Europe to fight in World War I. Military trains brought the virus to camps near Atlanta, Columbus and Macon — Camp Wheeler — before it spread to nearby cities. (And Camp Wheeler had just dealt with a measles epidemic the year before.)

Downtown Macon in the early 1900s.

“Today in Georgia History” pegs the date the virus descended on Macon as Oct. 15, 1918. “The Spanish influenza epidemic sweeping the nation hit Macon, with 250 new cases reported in the previous 48 hours.”  

Two huge forces were at cross-purposes that fall: continued soldier recruitment to fight (and the close quarters that effort entailed, from military trains to troopships), and the need for social distancing and shutting down activity to quell the virus’ spread.

It’s hard to believe, but the virus and its devastation weren’t often front-page news at the time, at least not in Macon. 

The major countries fighting in the war didn’t want to give their enemies any advantage, so the extent of the flu’s rampage — from both local and national leaders — was often minimized. There was wartime morale to consider. And officials wanted to preserve the public order and avoid panic.

Dispatches about the flu often ran on page 3 inside The Macon Daily Telegraph, said Joe Kovac Jr., a senior reporter for The Telegraph who looked at the paper’s coverage and tweeted about the outbreak recently:

“Our Spanish Flu coverage in Macon in October 1918 included an editorial on embracing inconveniences to avoid spread. (Wearing masks appears to have been encouraged: “A city of bandaged faces is better than coffins piled up in our morgues.”)

One subhead read: “Total of 191 New Cases Are Reported at Health Office, 46 Being from Payne’s Mill

Spanish flu update in The Macon Daily Telegraph.

From an editorial of the day titled “Flail the Flu,” which Kovac cited:

“If these men who have our community health in charge come to the decision all public gatherings should be closed they will act promptly and without fear because public sentiment is already strongly for that,” it read in part. “Fortunately it seems we are so far from the epidemic stage in Macon there is every hope it will not even threaten to reach that stage and that as it stands now it can be as well handled by people going pretty well as usual about their affairs provided they exercise due personal diligence in protecting both themselves and other people.”

As for our current challenge, we don’t know yet if the past is prologue, as Shakespeare told us. But we do know this: In this time of great uncertainty, what has gotten us through other national crises will serve us well now: Setting aside differences and pulling together. Helping each other however we can, from a video call to a grocery run for an older neighbor. Staying connected, through social media or across a backyard fence. Letting others know that they are not alone.

Stay safe and take care. And let us hear from you.

A Macon street bears his name, but you don’t know his story

You’d have to forgive Louis Persley if he had occasional bouts of identity crisis.

He was born in Macon in 1890 and died in 1932. You’ll find his first name spelled both “Lewis” and “Louis” in different registries. Census records from 1900, 1910 and 1920 spell his family’s last name “Pearsley,” “Parfley” and then “Persley.” There are even variations in his middle name (Hudson/Hudison).

A Macon street named for him (or his family) is spelled “Pursley,” and that’s how his name reads on his gravestone in Linwood Cemetery, where he is buried.

Louis Persley

But make no mistake. There was never any confusion about his talent in his chosen field, architecture. And that was at a time when such an achievement was virtually unheard of for a person of color. In fact, the Macon native was the first registered black architect in Georgia. It happened 100 years ago, on April 5,  1920.

Still, few people have ever heard of Persley. One reason is that there’s not a lot of information out there about him.

“He’s still obscure in history,” said Muriel McDowel Jackson, the head genealogy librarian and archivist at Washington Memorial Library. “We have black history, but we don’t have all of black history. We’re still learning information about people.”

(Jackson also told us about Wallace A. Rayfield, who was born in Macon in 1874 and also went on to become an architect. He designed the famous 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that was bombed in 1963 during the civil rights movement.)

Persley grew up in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood, now a historic district. His mother and father, Maxie and Thomas, lived with their four sons at 215 Madison St., although it’s now 122 Madison St. thanks to a recalibration of street addresses decades ago. 

Persley attended public schools in Macon and then headed to Lincoln University, a historically black university near Oxford, Penn. He graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology with an architecture degree in 1914.

Robert Robinson Taylor

Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama — now Tuskegee University — offered him a teaching job. (“He still had to come back south to practice,” Jackson said.)  He taught mechanical drawing until 1917, when he volunteered to fight in World War I. (A man named Robert Robinson Taylor was director of the college’s Mechanical Industries Department at the time. Remember that name.)

When Persley returned from the war, he was promoted to head of the Architectural Drawing Division.

He hadn’t been at Tuskegee long when he designed a new building for the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Athens, one of just a few projects he ever had in Georgia. (The church began as Pierce’s Chapel in 1866, during Reconstruction, and is thought to be the first congregation in Athens that black families forged after the Civil War.) A marker erected there in 2006 tells the story.

Marker outside the First A.M.E. Church in Athens

He designed the Chambliss Hotel in 1922 and helped with the seven-story Colored Masonic Temple in Birmingham, a Renaissance Revival building that was dedicated in 1924. There are also references to Atlanta jobs and design work on a two-story brick-and-stone funeral  home in Macon.

But he really made his mark at Tuskegee, designing many of the campus’s iconic buildings, several of them while working in partnership with his colleague, Robert Taylor, during the last decade of Persley’s life. Taylor & Persley Architects may have been the country’s first-ever formal partnership of two black architects.

In 1921, the two men completed their first building for the campus, James Hall, a dorm for nursing students. Among the others were Sage Hall, a dorm for young men where the Tuskegee Airmen would later live; Logan Hall, which merged athletic and entertainment facilities; the Armstrong Science Building; and the Hollis Burke Frissell Library.

An early rendering of Logan Hall

In a short YouTube video “The Persley House: An Architectural Gem in Tuskegee,” Persley’s granddaughter, Linda Kenney Miller, tells viewers about the house that Persley designed for his second wife, Phala Harper. He completed his final design for the home, located near the university, just months before he died, and he didn’t get to see the finished product. 

Louis Persley’s granddaughter, Linda Miller.

“Mr. Persley is another of these unsung heroes,” Miller says in the 3-minute video. “History has remembered Robert Taylor and not Louis Persley. … They were great compatriots and they worked together on so many projects. It’s a mystery to me.”

Persley died July 13, 1932, while hospitalized for kidney disease, and they held his funeral at Logan Hall. But he accomplished much before his death at a young age, like so many other renowned Macon residents over the years.

 “We should remember that Macon produced two African-American architects” during those turbulent years, Jackson said, “proving that anyone can become anything.” 

‘You are as good as anyone’

Ruth Hartley Mosley always made an impression.

She was tall and beautiful, with piercing eyes. A commanding presence in any setting.

She didn’t have time for trifles. Her mother died when she was 12. Her father, a boot maker, instilled in her a sense of resolve and self-sufficiency that guided her all of her days. 

She was born in Savannah in 1886, but lived in Macon most of her life, moving here with her first husband, Richard Hartley (Years after his death, she married Fisher Mosley.) She was a successful businesswoman during a time when the odds of such an achievement were squarely against a woman, especially a woman of color.

She owned a funeral home, more than a hundred rental properties and was one of the first women anywhere to earn a mortician’s license.

A nurse by training, Mosley helped teach dozens of black midwives. She also was active in Macon’s civil rights movement. After her death, she was an inductee into the Georgia Women of Achievement. (Authors Margaret Mitchell and Carson McCullers were in the same class.)

Still, many folks have never heard of her. 

“She had a vision, and she knew what she wanted,” said Gerri Marion-McCord, executive director of the Ruth Hartley Mosley Memorial Women’s Center. “She believed that if you had the ability to give, it was your responsibility to do so. … Not enough people have been exposed to her throughout the community.”

The Women’s Center is located in Mosley’s former home. It’s a beautiful old building on the short stretch of Spring Street near the Cotton Avenue Historic District. It is a “contributing building” to the Macon Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Until recently, that district — Macon’s leading black business community at one time — was on Historic Macon’s Fading Five list of endangered properties because of intense commercial development pressure. The district itself has made substantial progress thanks to preservation efforts and the work of such groups as the Cotton Avenue Coalition, but the Women’s Center is not on so firm a footing. It needs structural work. There’s plenty of rotten wood. The plaster walls are deteriorating.

“It’s shameful for a place like this to be in our community and not be recognized or preserved,” McCord said during a look around the center. “I don’t think we know what we’ve got here.”

But that could change — with the community’s help. McCord announced Tuesday that the center is in the running for a share of $2 million in preservation grants. Just 20 historic sites across the country that honor women’s history are eligible for the Partners in Preservation funding, provided by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and American Express.

But it will all depend on the number of votes that the center gets by Oct. 29. McCord urged Middle Georgia residents to go to voteyourmainstreet.org/macon and vote for the center. You can vote up to five times a day. There will also be a free Rockin’ and Rallyin’ for Ruth concert from 6-9 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, in High Street Park, right up the street from the center and across from First Baptist Church of Christ. You can vote there too.

During the turbulent 1950s and ‘60s, Mosley hosted civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, as well as Thurgood Marshall, before he was a Supreme Court justice. Her home was a refuge for them in the Jim Crow South, much like other sites that were featured in the movie “Green Book.”

Mosley cherished Macon, and she wanted the best for its residents. Since it opened its doors to the public in 1978, the nonprofit Women’s Center has provided help in keeping with her wishes: increasing educational opportunities for women and enhancing their life skills, as well as providing services for the community. That has included classes for aspiring nursing assistants.

Her estate included two trust funds. One provided financial assistance for needy students who wanted to become nurses or other health care providers. It’s been depleted. The other fund established the Women’s Center, but it, too, will soon be exhausted.

“She put her money where her mouth was,” McCord said. “It was very important to her to give back to the  community that gave so much to her. She tried to fulfill needs she saw in the community.

“She lived in her moment. She didn’t know that things would open up and be more inclusive. She left resources to provide for her people.”

Mosley died in Savannah in 1975 at age 89. She is buried in Linwood Cemetery, in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood.

The next time you’re strolling around Tattnall Square Park, take a moment to stop by the majestic fountain in the middle of the park.

At the base of the fountain wall, you will find words of inspiration and encouragement from influential Macon residents who’ve made a difference over the years.

Ruth Hartley Mosley is among them.

Her message there, set in stone, is as timeless as the values she held dear.

“You are as good as anyone. Never let the fact that you don’t have anything keep you from achieving.”

Here’s what ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ film crew thought about downtown Macon

Flint’s Grocery is gone. So too are Weber’s Cafe, Jay’s Beauty Salon and the Rathman/Lewis drugstore, “where you get what the doctor ordered.”

The Middletown Journal, like hundreds of its latter-day brethren, has also shut down.

They were all part of the filming for “Hillbilly Elegy” along Poplar Street. Now, workers have knocked down scaffolding and repainted storefronts up and down the street.

Photo: Oby Brown

It was our latest close-up for a major film, and several members of the small army of women and men working here said Macon should be proud of what it has downtown.

In particular, what it has saved downtown.

“You’ve got great buildings,” said Rick Riggs, the charge scenic artist on the set. “We were very pleasantly surprised at the architecture around town. … You’ve got great little storefronts. … There’s a great opportunity to revitalize the downtown area. We see it.”

Photo: Oby Brown

Riggs was standing outside a row of remade storefronts in the 600 block of Poplar. He described the process of replicating street scenes from Middletown, Ohio, where most of J.D. Vance’s bestseller is set, during three periods: the late 1990s, in 2012 and the late 1940s -- in that order -- for shooting. Workers had to “distress” a site one day, then use historically accurate touches -- appropriate colors, for example -- when they re-created the boom times of post-World War II Middletown. 

In all, at least 20 stores or buildings were transformed for filming across the county, most of them in and around downtown. Ron Howard is directing the Netflix movie, which stars Amy Adams and Glenn Close. The memoir tells the story of Vance’s family in Middletown and their struggles with poverty, alcoholism and abuse.

During the height of filming in Macon, one worker took a break and extolled what he’d seen downtown. Standing on the sidewalk, he noted the old Armory Building at the corner of First and Poplar, which was completed in 1885, then pointed out St. Joseph Catholic Church a little farther up the hill.

He called downtown Macon “a gold mine.” The buildings, by and large, are in good shape, and for movie purposes, you can take a store, add neon signs and you’re back in the 1950s. Then you can take out the neon and add LED lighting for a more modern look. But the sites work equally well for both settings, he said.

Photo: Oby Brown

Most of the folks in town for filming had never been to Macon, and almost all of them are gone now. Matt Sparks, a native of Jefferson, near Athens, is getting to know the city well, though.

He was assistant location manager for “Hillbilly Elegy” and a scout too. He arrived in town about a month before shooting began, and he’d just been in Macon in April for four days of shooting on HBO’s “Watchmen” series. During that filming, workers turned parts of Second and Cherry streets into 1940s Brooklyn.

“There’s a lot of room for opportunity here,” he said. “I look at the buildings and wonder, ‘What did this used to be?” Downtown Macon, he said, “has so much to offer.”

Plenty of forward-thinking Macon residents have reached the same conclusion in recent years as they converted long-dormant buildings into new retail or living space. You need only look at the soon-to-open Kudzu Seafood on Poplar, Famous Mike’s nearby, the Macon Beer Co.’s new taproom, which is nearing completion, or the dozens of other sites breathing new life, thanks to the preservation mind-set.  

When he could, Sparks took walks down alleyways and even paid a visit to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park while he was here.

“There are parts of history that just flash out,” he said of downtown’s buildings. “For me, it brings character to the city.”

In time, one stretch in the 600 block of Poplar that was used for filming will be torn down to make way for the planned Hyatt Place, a six-floor hotel with more than 100 rooms. 

Joe Couch, another member of the “Hillbilly Elegy” crew, saw a good bit of that work during his years as a Savannah resident. But he knows you’ve got to pick your spots carefully.

Couch, a prop maker for more than 40 years, said he marvelled at what he saw downtown.

“These are beautiful,” he said, looking around. “You don’t see this much any more. A lot of places, they’re tearing down everything. You haven’t done that.”

Then he paused.

“You should show a reverence for them,” he said of the old buildings. “If not, they’re long gone.”