“You can tell a lot about a town by the way it keeps up its courthouse and its cemeteries.”
— the late South Georgia attorney and Marine lieutenant colonel and World War II veteran John Mattox (1917-1993).
By Elliott Brack
Editor and publisher, GwinnettForum
MAY 30, 2025 | If you take the words above, it is obvious that the City of Norcross has a handsome City Hall, which is well kept up. However, you can’t say that about its city cemetery. It is east on Cemetery Street, which starts where Holcomb Bridge Road ends at Buford Highway.
It’s an old cemetery, dating back to 1870 when an early resident, Milton C. Lively, donated land for a community burial ground, a total of nine acres. (Part of that land is now the Cemetery Fields park.) In 1916, the city purchased land from Lively’s descendants, making the cemetery size about three acres. The land sits on a knoll above the park.
In the early 1900s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy led efforts to erect a covered stone pavilion near the current exit of the circle road within the cemetery, affording a place for visitors to rest or take cover from the weather. It has been kept up well. (A rack for a pamphlet about the cemetery recently was empty.)
Back in 2015, the city upgraded the cemetery, adding a black metal fence around the property, cleaning and repairing headstones, and replacing the pavilion’s roof. Much of the cemetery needs attention.
There are probably two reasons why the cemetery looks run down. It is operated under the budget of the city’s Parks Green Spaces and Trail Commission. There appears to be little constant care of the cemetery, though the grass is mowed occasionally.
The second aspect is that many of the older plots are in disrepair. Some headstones are broken and fallen to the ground, or the copings around family plots are cracked, dislodged and not maintained. This is probably because there are few living members of the people buried in the older family plots. No one is around to give the plots loving care.
There’s another problem. The city has no map of the cemetery showing where people are buried, or how many are buried. The city has no way to determine where there are open spaces for future burials. Therefore, unless a family knows where vacant spots for burial are in their plot, few burials take place in the city cemetery these days.
Some time ago, a new privately-owned cemetery was open across the street from the city cemetery. This is the Wright Cemetery, where most current burials in Norcross now take place. You can search online for 861 people buried in Wright Cemetery.
From all this, we can only conclude: the City Council of Norcross needs to be more pro-active in keeping up its city cemetery. Its residents buried there deserve that.
How about the other city cemeteries in Gwinnett? How does your city cemetery look? Write to GwinnettForum and tell us about it.
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