Rose Hill

“IT’S LIKE PAINTING A PICASSO’

There’s something reassuring in watching Roscoe Ross work.

The knowing eye. The strong, steady hands. The rhythm of his movement.

His way is an old way. It pays no mind to the TikTok world we live in, with its five-second attention span and fixation on fame.

You could say his trade — laying bricks — is biblical: “And you, oh son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and portray upon it a city,” the Good Book says. 

At sunrise one recent morning at Rose Hill Cemetery, Ross was getting the texture of concrete just right before he began troweling. He was adding a second thin layer to protect a row of old, decaying bricks at a private burial plot. 

You’ll find him at Rose Hill on many days, even on weekends. (“You have to take advantage of your sunny days. I’d prefer to be somewhere catching fish.”)

Last summer, after someone’s car or truck battered the arch at the cemetery’s College Street entrance, it was Ross who took on the restoration. He cleared away the damage, then set about to repair the arch, brick by brick, layer by layer.

If you’ve ever visited the burial site of Allman Brothers Band members near the main entrance to Rose Hill, you’ve seen more of his work. He laid all the bricks there, bringing the shrine to life.

The 68-year-old learned from the best. His dad, Oscar Ross Sr., was a master brick mason for more than 65 years. (So was one of his uncles.) Between the elder Ross and his son, they have 138 years of “union work” between them.

It’s a tie that binds. Sometimes on a job he pulls out one of his daddy’s tools, maybe his trowel. It keeps him connected.

Roscoe Ross was recently honored as one of Historic Macon’s 2024 Preservation Award winners. He won the Jenny Thurston Award, which salutes a lifetime of historic preservation work.

His father saw to it that young Roscoe got a head start on learning the trade. Many a day when the younger Ross got home from the old Duresville Elementary School on Millerfield Road, he would start stacking bricks in the barn, learning different patterns — running bond, jack-on-jack, herringbone — that he’d use on the job one day.

His father would come home from a long day of work, greet his wife, Amanda, then inspect what he had assigned his son to do, correcting him where he needed to.

“When other kids were playing with Play-Doh, I was playing with bricks,” he said with a laugh.

During the summer, he also helped his grandfather, Benjamin Collins, on his Donnan Road farm. Much of Collins’ 145 acres was devoted to fruit orchards — peaches, apples, grapes — but there were peas, beans, corn and plenty more in the garden to harvest in the summer heat.

“I was his right-hand man till I was 10,” Ross said. “Once I got to 10, they put a trowel in my hand.” 

During his days at Northeast High School, he got a part-time job at a Piggly-Wiggly store, stocking shelves and carrying out customers’ groceries. Working at the store also meant he got a Social Security card, which he needed to get into the union.

There were two brick-mason unions back in those days: the Local No. 4, for Black masons, located above the H&H restaurant, and the Local No. 17, for white brick masons. Once you were accepted into a union, you had five years to get certified as a journeyman brick mason.

In 1973, the year he graduated from Northeast, he began twice-a-week classes in the evening, learning everything the program offered, including how to read blueprints.

“You set your own pace,” Ross said. He was able to finish that training in three years because of all that practice in his youth. (He’ll get his 50-year union card soon.)

 “All of that training I did back then for my dad put me years ahead of everybody else,” he said. “Dad was getting me ready for an apprenticeship.” 

In short order,  “I was a full-fledged bricklayer,” he said. Others would have to get on-the-job training.

‘YOU ONLY GET ONE SHOT’

Bartholomew Duhart

He worked for his father about 25 years, but he also worked for other contractors in town, including Bartholomew Duhart, whose creations across the Unionville neighborhood in particular are legendary.

Ross would travel out of town on occasion — even to work on the Buckhead home of Capricorn Records co-founder Phil Walden — but he preferred being home with his wife, Debra, and seeing his son, Jonathan, who now lives near Atlanta. (Ask him about the two-year British Petroleum project east of Chicago, where more than 200 brick masons lined the inside of 8-foot-tall pipes with fire bricks for more than a quarter mile.)

Ross quickly made a name for himself. People would call his father and ask if Ross could help with their brick or stone projects. 

He’s worked on four different homes for Macon attorney Frank Horne, everything from walkways to fireplaces. (Horne also knew Ross’ father.)

The walkway in front of Frank Horne’s home.

“When people are out walking the dog or pushing a baby stroller, they stop in front of my house (on Albermarle Place) all the time and ask, “Who did this brickwork,” Horne said. “It is absolutely amazing.

“Everybody knows he’s the best. There’s nobody at his level.”

Maryel Battin, left.

In time Ross met Maryel Battin, who led the Historic Macon Foundation for 17 years. After he did some work for her, she saw his talent and asked him to help with restoration and historic preservation projects whenever he could.

Now, decades later, you’ll find that work all over town. A walkway (and reset stone) at Washington Park. Brick walls outside Mercer Law School. At the Robert E. Lee Building, formerly the Professional Building and home to WIBB studio. Inside and outside Mount de Sales High School. The Cannonball House. The old warehouse where 41 NBC is located.

And soon at the Hay House, where it looks like a delivery vehicle hit one of the stately columns near the driveway.

Ross’ work on the Rose Hill arch.

On a job, he knows the most important thing he can do. It’s pretty simple. “As you go, just stand back and look at your work,” he said. “Pick out your flaws and straighten ’em out while you can.”

In his line of work, mistakes are easy to spot.

“Brick work has always been under everybody’s eye to where it has to be perfect — straight joints, straight head joints, the whole nine yards,” he said. “You may not know anything about brick work, but you can look to see if it’s straight or if it’s pure ugly. You know what I mean?”

In its own way, it is a work of art. And you don’t get second chances. 

“It’s like painting a Picasso,” he said. “You only get one shot to do this. You can’t come back tomorrow.” 

When the Rose Hill archway was damaged last summer, there were sentiments to just tear it down and rebuild. But Ross knew he could save it, and the results have drawn praise far and wide. He used 8-inch bricks — almost 90 years old — for the project that had been set aside for such restorations. (Using incompatible materials can cause damage to historic masonry.)

He credits the foresight of consultant Bill Causey in collecting — and saving — old bricks, cobblestone, marble and more that are invaluable in such preservation projects. It was crucial in saving the old archway. Ross used hundreds of them.

Rose Hill, which opened in 1840, holds a special place for Ross. He has a real sense of history — and pride — about Macon too, even talking at one point about how important it was to Macon’s growth that the city had two big brick companies: Cherokee Brick, founded in 1877, and Burns Brick, founded in 1936.

“Here, Rose Hill, you can’t find a better place to do masonry surgery,” he said. “It’s needed in here. You can see where the families preserved nice, beautiful plots, but over the years of neglect the walls are collapsing. You can go in and surgically restore them. … Whatever the material is, though, we have to match it. That’s what makes it so exciting.”

Historic preservation, he says, “is the heart of the city, … but it takes a lot of effort.”

Causey, who worked for decades with Macon’s Engineering and Public Works departments, now oversees work at Rose Hill. He has turned to Ross time and time again for repairs that require an expert’s touch.

Simply put, Ross’ restoration work on walls, steps and more “is a beauty to behold,” he said.

“He is truly a master craftsman, and upon his departure from this honorable trade, there will be a huge void, unlikely to be filled in today’s construction industry,” Causey said.

“There will always be bricklayers,” he said, “but there will never be another master craftsman like Roscoe Ross.”

‘It has consumed my life’

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

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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. 

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“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.

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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.

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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.)

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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. 

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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.

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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.”