This is a slight reworking of an article we originally published in June of 2018, when the readership for the Cobb County Courier was much smaller than our current traffic.
Mount Harmony Baptist Church Cemetery: a historic cemetery adjacent to a new one
Mount Harmony Baptist Church Cemetery is on Veteran’s Memorial Highway in Mableton, Georgia, about 3.2 miles west of I-285. It is just to the east of the church, and to the south and west of the larger Mount Harmony Memorial Gardens. Although the two cemeteries are adjacent, they are separate properties, with the church responsible for the maintenance of their cemetery. The church cemetery sits prominently on a hill overlooking Veteran’s Memorial, with a striking view of the Atlanta skyline to the east.
It’s easy to tell the boundaries of the two properties, though, as the church cemetery has old-fashioned upright markers, and the larger cemetery has newer-style flat markers intended for easier mowing. The newer commercial cemetery is notable as the burial place of singer and songwriter Joe South and his family.
Family Names and Road Names
A notable thing about this historic church cemetery is the number of families whose names are also the names of Mableton and South Cobb roads, among them Dodgen, Glore, Buckner, and Allen.
Origin and Earliest Burials
The church was probably founded in 1871 since a pamphlet was written for the church’s centennial in 1971. The earliest date of death on a marker in the cemetery is for William J Dodgen, 1845-1863, but he died in Ohio, and it’s possible he was re-interred after the founding of the church. The earliest date of death consistent with the founding of the church was that of Ransom Allen who died on July 6, 1877. The dates on his marker were listed by Sarah Blackwell Gober Temple when she surveyed Cobb County cemeteries for her 1935 book The First Hundred Years: A Short History of Cobb County in Georgia.
Check out the slideshow below. An interactive google map to the cemetery is embedded at the bottom of this post.
