Old Salt Springs Cemetery in Lithia Springs, Georgia

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Get directions 6962 Lakeside Drive
Lithia Springs, Georgia 30122 United States

Coordinates: 33.79222, -84.64798
Cemetery ID:

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Also known as Salt Springs Campground Cemetery

Look at the end of Lakeside Drive and spot tennis courts and a gravel parking lot. The cemetery is in the woods on the eastern edge of that parking lot.

Driving directions: From Thornton Road, turn west on Bankhead Highway ( US 78), take a left on Lakeside Drive, stay to the right and go around the lake, following Lakeside to the end -- past all buildings and into the gravel parking lot that adjoins the tennis courts. There is a path from the parking lot into the cemetery (only about 40 feet away). This is private property and requires permission to visit.

Description: This cemetery is one of the earliest in the county, originally associated with a Methodist campground, and is believed to date from the 1830s. There are 100 or more burials, most marked only by un-inscribed fieldstone markers. In 1939, Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett surveyed it and noted even then that it had been vandalized. Subsequently local historian Joe Baggett surveyed it in 1981 and could not find many of the markers that Garrett had recorded. Today only two inscribed markers (dated 1854 and 1864) remain in the cemetery. Further off in the woods there are several markers scattered on the ground, but probing indicates they are not actually on graves. When annual cleaning began in 2008, the entire cemetery was covered by knee-deep English ivy.

Some burial information came from a survey done by Dr Luke Garrett and Renee Berry in the early 1970's.

The property was owned for 50 years by the late Ruth Blair of the Georgia Department of Archives & History, a great-granddaughter of Samuel G. Mozley.