| Old City Cemetery | |
| Map Type: | Georgia (U.S. state)#United States |
| Established: | 1825 |
| Type: | City |
| Coordinates: | 32.8314°N -83.6222°W |
| Owner: | Macon–Bibb County |
| Location: | Macon, Georgia |
| Country: | United States |
| Findagraveid: | 2302921 |
The Old City Cemetery is a small cemetery located in Macon, Georgia, United States. Established in 1825, it saw burials until the 1840s, when Rose Hill Cemetery, a much larger cemetery in the city, opened. Following this, the cemetery fell into ruins, and following failed efforts in the late 1800s to convert the area to a public park, the cemetery was restored in the 1970s. The cemetery is located in the Macon Railroad Industrial District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.[1]
The 4acres cemetery was established in 1825, just southeast of what is today downtown Macon, Georgia.[2] Referred to as "God's Acre" by Maconites, individuals interred at the cemetery include a major from the American Revolutionary War and the daughter of Jared Irwin, a Governor of Georgia. By the 1830s, however, the city council of Macon feared that the City Cemetery would soon become inadequate for Macon's needs, and appointed a commission to establish Rose Hill Cemetery, likely the first rural cemetery in the Southern United States.[3] This much larger cemetery opened in 1840 and quickly became the main burial place for the city.[4] [5] The last burial to take place at the Old City Cemetery occurred a few years later in 1843. Following this, the cemetery fell into ruins, with an 1891 article in The Telegraph describing it as “a wilderness, a ruined necropolis, the habitation only of dogs and vermin; the wasteland in the slums of a city.” That same year, the Macon city council began to exhume the hundreds of bodies that were buried in the cemetery, with the intent of converting the cemetery to a public park called "Founder's Park" that would feature a monument describing the cemetery. However, these plans never came to fruition. In 1914, the fire department put out a fire at the cemetery, caused by sparks from a passing streetcar. Throughout the 20th century, local churches and organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution performed upkeep and repairs to the city-owned cemetery, which underwent a restoration in the 1970s.[6]