Southern Graves

Five counties in northeast Georgia—Madison, Elbert, Oglethorpe, Oconee, and Clarke—were the entire world for three generations of the Eberhart family. Landscapes ranged from deep rural isolation to a bustling, rail-connected, manufacturing mecca. The more than three decades between the birth of John Eberhart, about 1841, and that of his son Stokely (Stokes) in 1878 were a whirlwind. The railroad arrived—bringing the outside world with it; the Civil War emancipated, devastated, and nearly starved; and Reconstruction came and went. Stokes probably thought the stories he heard about the gains African Americans made shortly after the Civil War were tall tales and not to be believed. Just months before he was born, Georgia adopted a new state constitution that instituted a poll tax used to disenfranchise Black voters. The lives of Stokes and his children, including a son named John Lee, were defined by a complex navigation of agrarian labor and the rigid, often violent, social codes of the ...

When Gladys Marie Campbell Abernathy died in early 1941, she was just 37 years old. On paper, her death certificate lists a "coronary occlusion" as the cause, but the location of her passing reveals a much more heartbreaking reality. Gladys died inside Missouri’s State Hospital No. 4 in Farmington, a facility for the mentally ill. While the official record cites a heart issue, the contributing cause—"Manic Depressive Psychosis"—hints that this young mother of six wasn't just battling a physical ailment, but likely suffering from what we now recognize as severe postpartum psychosis. Gladys's mother Hattie died on 8 June 1933, at the age of 49. Gladys was 29 at the time and had given birth to her fourth child just six months prior. To understand the sheer weight Gladys was carrying, consider that over the course of thirteen years, she bore six children. She seemingly never got a break from birthing and nursing. When the 1940 Federal Census was enumerated in Ap...