[Entrance to the Hooper-McWilliams cemetery (photo by Larry Felton Johnson)]

[This an evergreen article that we periodically republish as our readership grows, often with added materials from the Georgia Historic Newspapers database and website housed at the University of Georgia as we discover them]

The Hooper-McWilliams Cemetery began as a family cemetery on the property of Cobb County resident Thomas Hooper, one of the first European-American residents of this county in the early 19th century.  It is not known exactly when Hooper arrived, but Sarah Blackwell Gober Temple, in her book The First Hundred Years, A Short History of Cobb County, in Georgia, published in the 1930s, lists Hooper as part of the first wave of white people to move into the county beginning in 1832 just before the county was created in 1833.

The cemetery is tiny, especially compared to the size of the modern perpetual-care cemetery it abuts.  

It’s now adjacent to the larger Riverview Memorial Park but is not owned by the larger cemetery.  Both cemeteries border Georgia Power’s Plant Atkinson, and are very close to the South Cobb Drive bridge over the Chattahoochee River. The nearest road to Hooper-McWilliams is Maner Road.

Find-a-Grave lists 26 known interments.  The oldest known burial, in 1836, was that of the infant Christian Hooper.  William B. Miller, in 1985, is the most recent. The earliest graves are marked with rough stones, so it’s impossible to tell from onsite inspection whether the unmarked graves are from burials earlier than 1836.

Thomas Hooper himself died in 1879 and, according to find-a-grave, is buried in the cemetery.

The McWilliams family’s name became part of the cemetery in about 1854, when Nancy Ann Hooper, the daughter of Thomas Hooper and Mary Herren Hooper, married David Love McWilliams. 

The cemetery is now slightly outside the city limits of Smyrna, GA.  When burials began there, the cemetery was probably within Boltonville, a 19th-century town covering much of that area on the Cobb County side of the river (not to be confused with the town of Bolton, directly across the Chattahoochee River in Fulton County).

There is some inconsistency on the web about whether Boltonville and Bolton were the same town. Still, the following excerpt from the last will and testament of Soloman Edwards leads me to believe that Boltonville at the very least extended into Cobb County, even if the Fulton County Bolton and Boltonville were the same town:

Last will and testament of Solomon Edwards, addressed to Mr. James Maner of Boltonville, Cobb County, dated March 4, 1844.

A copy of the complete document also describes Maner’s address as Boltonville, Cobb County.

James Maner’s farm was in Cobb County at present-day Maner Road.

Watch the slideshow below:

PREV

NEXT