In "Atlanta and Environs," historian Franklin M. Garrett wrote that Oakland Cemetery is "Atlanta's most tangible link between the past and the present." Within its forty-eight acres are more than seventy thousand personal stories--of settlers and immigrants who forged a city from a rowdy railroad camp, former slaves who carved out lives in a segregated world, soldiers in blue and gray who were cut down in a brutal civil war, and civic and business visionaries who rebuilt the Phoenix City from the ashes of war and carried it to prominence on the international stage.
Today, Atlanta's oldest public cemetery remains a must-see destination for anyone interested in the city's colorful story. Past the grieving mien of the Lion of Atlanta, which guards nearly three thousand unknown Confederate soldiers, visitors can pay respect to those who made Atlanta history--former slave Carrie Steele Logan, who founded the first orphanage for African American children; Joseph Jacobs, owner of the pharmacy where Coca-Cola was first served as a fountain drink; Morris and Emanuel Rich, founders of the storied Rich's Department Stores; golfing Grand Slam legend Bobby Jones; "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell; Maynard Jackson, the city's first African American mayor, and many others. Aside from its importance as a historic site, Oakland is among the nation's finest examples of a rural garden cemetery, characteristic of the nineteenth-century movement to transform stark burial grounds into pastoral landscapes for both the repose of the dead and the enjoyment of the living.
With Ren and Helen Davis's engaging narrative, rich photography, archival images, and detailed maps, "Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery" is a versatile guide for touring the cemetery's landscape of remembrance, as well as a unique way to explore Atlanta's history.
A Friends Fund Publication. Published in association with the Historic Oakland Foundation.

George Alexander Grant is an unknown elder in the field of American landscape photography. Just as they did the work of his contemporaries Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and others, millions of people viewed Grant's photographs; unlike those contemporaries, few even knew Grant's name. Landscapes for the People shares his story through his remarkable images and a compelling biography profiling patience, perseverance, dedication, and an unsurpassed love of the natural and historic places that Americans chose to preserve. A Pennsylvania native, Grant was introduced to the parks during the summer of 1922 and resolved to make parks work and photography his life. Seven years later, he received his dream job and spent the next quarter century visiting the four corners of the country to produce images in more than one hundred national parks, monuments, historic sites, battlefields, and other locations. He was there to visually document the dramatic expansion of the National Park Service during the New Deal, including the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Grant's images are the work of a master craftsman. His practiced eye for composition and exposure and his patience to capture subjects in their finest light are comparable to those of his more widely known contemporaries. Nearly fifty years after his death, and in concert with the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, it is fitting that George Grant's photography be introduced to a newgeneration of Americans.