When the latest section of the PATH 400 trail that connects Wieuca Road to Loridans Drive opened at the end of September, it provided walkers a striking 80-foot-high view from a bridge down to Mountain Way as well as a peak at one of Atlanta’s oldest family cemeteries. The 0.75 mile section is a quick walk from Historic Brookhaven and runs adjacent to GA 400. It is the latest addition to almost three miles of greenway running through nearby Buckhead.

 

The portion closest to Loridans Drive is known as Loridans Park and much of it was once part of D.F. McClatchey Elementary School property. From 1956 to 1973, McClatchey was Historic Brookhaven’s neighborhood elementary school. Neighborhood children would walk or ride their bikes across Peachtree Dunwoody Road and along Loridans Drive, past the Lowery-Stevens Cemetery on their way to school.

 

“We all knew about the little cemetery next door [to the school],” Myron Ramsdell, a longtime Historic Brookhaven resident who grew up in the neighborhood and now lives at Lake Hartwell, told Stroll Historic Brookhaven in September 2023. “I’d peddle real fast through there – knowing I had to ride by that cemetery.”

 

Back then, the cemetery may still have had tombstones but since those have all disappeared. Through the years, the cemetery was vandalized and looted. As part of the PATH 400 project, Livable Buckhead along with Park Pride identified roughly 40 graves. They were once marked with pink flags, but most of those are now gone.

 

Adults and children are buried in the cemetery. It likely includes slave graves as well, according to Denise Starling, executive director of Livable Buckhead. She adds that the graves are not all oriented the same way.

 

The cemetery’s most noted resident is James Lowery Jr. who was shot and killed in 1852 in a quarrel with George Washington Evins. The men were arguing about a property sale, likely that of an enslaved person, notes Starling. Lowery’s father owned the cemetery land and buried his son there. James Lowery Sr. was later buried in the cemetery.

 

William H. Stevens, who purchased the land from Lowery in the 1870s, is also buried there next to his wife. Stevens owned 100 acres that included a mill at the current location of the Wieuca Overlook neighborhood. Wieuca Road was once called Stevens Mill Road.

 

The cemetery sits off to the left of the pathway as you enter from Loridans Drive. It’s surrounded by a rope barrier, which was a Boy Scout project. “There’s a 20-foot buffer around where the graves were identified,” says Starling. The cemetery is not accessible by foot and can only be viewed at a distance.

 

The area will remain wild and inaccessible. Livable Buckhead does not want to disturb the graves any more. “The idea is to create a natural area with blue wildflowers interspersed and bordered with a wrought iron fence,” Starling notes. Panels will tell some of the cemetery’s stories. She estimates the project will start in about a year.