American Lives

In 1785, Benjamin and Sarah Crowley brought their family to Georgia's Oglethorpe County. This included their son, James Crowley, born in 1772 in Pittsylvania County, VA.

James received about five hundred acres (202 hectares) in 1822 in Decatur, to the immediate east of Atlanta, from the land lotteries which ceded native lands to white settlers. He farmed it until his death in 1828, purchasing additional farms (and a number of enslaved people) along the way and doing well financially.

For their cemetery the family selected a hill which overlooked their land. When James died he was buried there, as was his wife, Dorcas, in 1852.

Their son, Allen Crowley, owned the land between 1829 and 1846, when he moved his family by wagon train to northern Mississippi. Younger brother Seaborn Crowley and his family took it over between 1846 and 1896, when it was purchased by the Hill Family (also Crowley relatives).

According to Forest Crowley, the cemetery was originally in the middle of pasture on the farm, surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Over a number of years in the 1950s, this fence fell into disrepair and livestock was able to enter the cemetery.

In 1960, the Hills sold part of the land and leased the other part so that the Columbia Mall could be built. This construction was part of the suburban American mall-building boom which started in the mid-twentieth century.

Columbia Mall was situated on twenty-eight acres (eleven hectares) of the acquired land, and was one of the first enclosed malls in the region to feature air-conditioning, a great draw in the sun belt. At 400,000 square feet (37,000 square meters), the mall was located near the Memorial Drive and Columbia Road intersection, and was anchored by Davison's (later Macy’s) and Sears.

The builder agreed to preserve the cemetery. To do this, the land around it was dug away to a depth of about twenty to twenty-five feet (between 6-7.6 meters) to become the parking lot, and an outer wall was built to contain the cemetery burials and what remained of the hilltop in today's stone mausoleum.

Currently, the eleven graves (nine of them of the box variety) on the flagstone-covered top of the mausoleum are members of the Crowley, Cross, and Hawkins families. Seven are adults and four are children.

The area around the mall changed in the late seventies and eighties, as 'white flight' hit Atlanta (with white families migrating out of the city). Some of the mall's stores began to close.

When Macy's closed their clearance store here in 1995, the writing was on the wall. In 2001 the entire mall closed and sat empty until Walmart purchased the land and demolished the mall. Delayed by community protests, construction work on a 'supercenter' began, opening in 2008.

According to Forest Crowley there have been a number of break-ins at the mausoleum over the last several years, and some of the headstones on top of the box tombs have been broken and thrown into the parking lot, and then thrown away. Other headstones have been stolen.

Due to the reconfiguration of the parking lot, the Crowley Mausoleum is now mostly hidden from the Walmart development by trees (behind it in this photo) and sits next to a Napa Auto Parts store (to the left of the photo). It cannot be seen from the Walmart parking lot but it can be glimpsed while driving past the Napa on Memorial Drive.

There were also forty or fifty graves of enslaved people which surrounded the cemetery before the hilltop was removed. Sadly no effort was made to save those graves so that most were lost during the construction of Columbia Mall.

Recently it was found that a few of those graves still survive underneath the tarmac around the mausoleum (see the '11 Alive' news feature via YouTube for details of the investigation).