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.”