Bagley grew black community in heart of Buckhead

William Bagley courtesy Buckhead Heritage Society

It is a bit of a blessing William Bagley did not live to see what became of his beloved community in Buckhead in the mid-1900s.

The events that brought him to the area were much more heinous than what Fulton County did to get rid of the all-black neighborhood off Pharr Road beginning in 1945, but it would have marked the second time he was forced from land he owned on account of the color of his skin.

Bagley’s story was narrated by his granddaughter, Elon Butts Osby, to the Buckhead Heritage Society, a transcript of which is available on the nonprofit’s website. Osby’s mother Willie Mae Bagley was born in Macedonia Park, a black community comprised of about 400 families spread over 21 acres in the heart of Buckhead.

Though the community dated back to the 1870s, white developer John Owens formally incorporated it as Macedonia Park in 1921 by building several modest homes on small lots. Two grocery stores, two churches and a blacksmith served the neighborhood.

The earliest record of William Bagley is in 1870, when he was just 3 years old living in Forsyth County, according to Nasir Muhammad, who operates black history tours throughout Atlanta. This is an important piece of information and is directly related to his turning up in Buckhead four decades later.

As recounted by his granddaughter, a terrible crime was committed in Forsyth County in 1912. Two black males were accused of raping a white woman. When the community learned of the allegations, it turned against the black residents. The result was the largest exodus of African Americans in the history of the country, according to Muhammad.

As much as 98 percent of blacks living in Forsyth Country were forced to leave as white mobs set fire to homes and murdered innocent men, women and children. The violence spread to the surrounding counties as well. In some areas every black resident fled fearing for their lives, never to return.

Bagley was one of them. According to his granddaughter, he had to abandon 84 acres in Forsyth County. He relocated his family to Macedonia Park. Osby has heard her grandfather operated a grocery store there, but she said that came from people outside of her family.

Her family knew their grandfather to be a businessman. In 1928 a security note shows he purchased six lots in the subdivision for $2,100. Osby recounted a story of her grandfather going to the corner of Peachtree and Paces Ferry roads, where soldiers frequently gathered, and bringing back the scraps of what had been fed to the horses.

Osby’s mother and father owned a popular rib shack in Macedonia Park, which became known as Bagley Park. She said she thinks her grandfather’s name became associated the community because he was an educated man who rose to be a leader and the unofficial “mayor.” Muhammad said the Bagleys worked tirelessly to create a model black community. Bagley died in 1939 and his wife Ida in 1945.

The rest of the story is pretty well known. As Buckhead grew, white communities encroached on Macedonia Park. There were complaints about crime, noise and pollution. The Ku Klux Klan made regular threatening appearances.

According to a history of Bagley/Frankie Allen Park by Susan Conger, Fulton County passed an ordinance publicly condemning the community.

Between 1945 and 1953 the county acquired all of the lots either by purchase or eminent domain. Land owners were given anywhere from nothing to $5,000. Osby’s mother, the daughter of William Bagley, and father were among the residents forced from their property.

The county destroyed the community and created a public park, calling it Bagley Park. That was the lone concession the county made, that the park would bear the name of William Bagley, Osby said. In 1980 the name was changed to honor Allen, a beloved Buckhead Baseball umpire. Bagley’s name adorns the lone street running through the park.

Read more: Neighbor Newspapers – Column Bagley grew black community in heart of Buckhead

Vinings ‘playhouse’ was artist’s canvas

Ellie Mae Rowe, courtesy Black Art in America

I remember the house well. It was on the right side of Paces Ferry Road in Vinings if you were headed west. The fence was covered with worn and weathered stuffed animals; cans and bottles hung from the trees in the front yard from string.

It didn’t look like art. It looked like trash. It looked junky and unkept, even scary to a young person. I didn’t know who lived there. Even though my mother was herself an artist and collected folk pieces she never told me about Nellie Mae Rowe.

Rowe festooned her three-room house near the railroad tracks with homemade dolls, found objects and just about anything that caught her eye. Just like Howard Finster, the man who created the famous Paradise Garden in Summerville, Nellie Mae Rowe was a deeply religious, self-taught artist who saw beauty in things others did not. Just like Finster’s eclectic outdoor folk art Mecca, Rowe used her home and her property to express herself.

Born in 1900 to a father who had been a slave, she was raised in Fayette County on a rented farm. Rowe and her nine brothers and sisters spent much of their youth working in the fields. She learned to sew as well, but she loved more than anything laying on the floor of their home and drawing pictures. In a short documentary about her life by Linda Armstrong, Rowe said drawing pictures is all that she wanted to do when she was a child. She also made dolls out of old rags and discarded quilts. She would tie them in a way to create a head, arms and legs and draw eyes on them. She played with them every day. Her family did not like it, though, and told her to stop. She did it anyway.

Rowe moved with her first husband, Ben Wheat, to Vinings in 1930. He died in 1936, and later that year she married a man named Henry “Buddy” Rowe. She and Buddy Rowe built the small house with a screened-in front porch on Paces Ferry Road, back when Vinings was out in the country.

After her second husband died in 1948, Rowe did not remarry. She did housework to support herself but she always created. Over time, her house went from being her home to her “playhouse.” That is what she called it.

Behind a fence was a shallow yard, and just about every inch of it had something to see. She saw beauty in things people no longer wanted. She took discarded items from the side of the road and turned them into works of art accenting her yard and house. She made sculptures out of chewing gum. She hung things off the porch and the trees. The lone constant was color — nearly everything she collected had a brightness to it, or at least at one point it did.

In her back yard she kept a garden, but it, too, was joined by the myriad of found objects that drew her eye. She spent her days drawing, “placing” things, making her dolls and singing old hymns.

People slowed down when they drove past her house. Her yard in many ways was a work of art itself, an extension of this colorful, eclectic, self-taught artist.

For those curious enough to approach, Rowe was always welcoming and even invited people into her home, where she played her electric piano and sang as they gawked at the wall-to-wall artwork, statues, decorations of all kinds, drawings, family pictures and dolls. Her artwork was bursting with color, done with crayons and markers on sheets of paper.

She was “discovered” in 1976, when the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead presented an exhibit that included her work. Upon seeing it, gallery owner and artist champion Judith Alexander reached out to Rowe. The two became friends and Alexander became Rowe’s art dealer. She exhibited her work at Alexander’s Buckhead gallery, and then she was off to a show in New York. Over the next several years, many exhibitions across the country featured Rowe’s work.

By the time success found her, however, she had weathered hands and referred to herself as an old woman. Rowe died in 1982.

Today her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, the American Folk Museum in New York and many others. Her Vinings playhouse, perhaps her greatest work, has been lost to time.

Read more: Neighbor Newspapers – Column Vinings playhouse served as artist s canvas

African-American cemetery nearly forgotten on Vinings hillside

For many years civic clubs, Boy Scouts and local students gathered in Vinings Cemetery at Halloween to clear debris, right fallen tombstones and pick up trash.

It was the perfect time of year to spend a few hours among the seemingly abandoned grave markers, some of which have been rendered unreadable by time, the raised lettering worn away.

Vinings Cemetery sits on a wooded hillside between Paces Ferry Road and the maroon-hued Paces West office buildings. Markers precariously teeter on the steep slope. Several have fallen over. Some of the graves sites have collapsed, which happens when a coffin decays to the point that the earth falls in on it, leaving a distinct depression in the ground.

Vinings Cemetery was connected to both New Salem African Methodist Church and Mount Sinai Baptist Church. These churches supported black communities in the area that dated back to the turn of the last century. Late author and historian Anthony Doyle said slaves were brought to Vinings during the Civil War to build the Confederate fortifications. When the war ended some of the freed slaves remained in the area, finding employment as farmers and domestic help. These are the families that built the two churches and whose remains are now interred in Vinings Cemetery.

Some of the graves are recent. I found a marker for a man named Willie North dated 1990, but others go back to the 1890s. In the center is a small monument marking the final resting place of Milton McAfee, who was born May 3, 1886 and died Oct. 8, 1918. On the marker is the square and compass of the Freemasons.

There was no cleanup this past Halloween. The group did such an excellent job of cleaning it up over several years that they found they didn’t have much to do a few years ago and the tradition faded. But now it does need some help. Nature has begun to exert her will; groundcover is creeping ever closer to the markers and tree branches and debris have fallen on the grave sites.

The disappointing thing is there is nothing to mark this cemetery, to tell passerby and the curious what it is, why it is there or who is buried there.