Church-state considerations halt restoration of historical graveyard

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Posted 7:49AM on Tuesday, December 31, 2002

SHARON - More than 200 years ago, Roman Catholic families built a log sanctuary in an east Georgia community known as Locust Grove. The original church and Locust Grove itself are gone. Only a graveyard remains, tucked in a wooded glade off a dirt road in Taliaferro County, 50 miles west of Augusta. Two years ago, the Legislature voted to appropriate $30,000 for the historical site to the Department of Natural Resources' Historic Preservation Division. The DNR then awarded the money as a grant to the archdiocese to refurbish the cemetery. But shortly after, the DNR suspended giving grants to Georgia churches for historical preservation projects, fearing it violated the separation of church and state. The cemetery project hasn't received any money, said archdiocese archivist John Hanley. After the Locust Grove community was founded in the late 1700s, it was settled by families fleeing the aftermath of the French Revolution and landowners escaping slave uprisings in Haiti. Later, Irish immigrants came. The prospering settlement founded Locust Grove Academy and incorporated it as a chartered Catholic school in 1821, according to records from the Archdiocese of Atlanta. Many prominent Georgians, including Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, were educated there. Parishioners built the Church of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in 1821 to replace the original log church, and a permanent priest came in 1822. In the 1850s, a branch of the Georgia Railroad linked Sharon with Augusta, bringing commerce into town in 1877. In the early 1980s, the Rev. John Fallon organized a cleanup of the cemetery. Many tombstones were broken and covered with weeds, their inscriptions barely readable. With $5,000 from the archdiocese, Fallon hired a company to restore the headstones and worked to clear away the brush and brambles. Today, with dwindling membership - and the town of Sharon losing population - the Church of the Purification no longer has a priest or regular Mass. The white building on Ga. 47 has become a station church, part of St. Joseph's Parish in nearby Washington. It's used now only for special occasions.