GROUP SHARES STORIES FROM THE CEMETERY by Jackie Finch

Rose Hill Rambles teach visitors about history in Georgia

By Jackie Finch, Hoosier Times, The Herald-Times, Bloomington Indiana (Originally published January 20, 2002)

(MACON, Ga.) The physician was convinced the prescription he wrote for a patient was correct. The pharmacist who was asked to fill it was sure the medicine was deadly.

To prove his point, the doctor swallowed the prescribed measure himself. He promptly died.

Dr. Ambrose Baber (1792 – 1846) is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Ga. His grave and bizarre story are shared in a Southern tradition known as a "ramble."

"Rambling is part of the process in the South of having a sense of place," says Phil Comer, a member of the Middle Georgia Historical Society.

"One way you keep in touch with your sense of place," Comer says, "is through storytelling and going to the cemetery and rambling -- retelling the stories of people who have gone before."

On this sunny afternoon, Comer is taking us on a short ramble through Rose Hill Cemetery. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the 77-acre cemetery is one of the nation's earliest surviving public landscape cemeteries.

HISTORY LIVES AT ROSE HILL by Dan Maley

The Telegraph, Monday, Oct. 26, 2009 

History lives at Rose Hill Cemetery thanks to semiannual tours

By Dan Maley - dmaley@macon.com

(Macon, Ga) There’s a lot more to Rose Hill Cemetery than meets the eye.

Those rough stone blocks in that retaining wall came from the collapsed ruins of one of the towers at Fort Hawkins, the first white settlement in this part of Georgia.

That flagpole towering over a hillside of Confederate graves came from Cochran Field, where Royal Air Force pilots trained during World War II.

That patch of grass may cover the remains of an early Maconite — after all, only one third of the graves in Rose Hill are marked.

With its skyline of monuments, terraced plots and variety of trees, Rose Hill offers a pleasant walk at any time of year. But to really appreciate the history of the place, you’ve got to take a ramble.

In 1977 the late Calder Payne, working with the Middle Georgia Historical Society, began giving twice-yearly cemetery walking tours called Rose Hill Rambles. The tradition continues under the auspices of the seven-year-old Historic Rose Hill Cemetery Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the 169-year-old city property.

Sunday, about 200 people turned out for the most recent ramble. The man with the megaphone and the facts was Phil Comer, a writer, historian and toxicologist. Comer has been giving tours of the cemetery since the ’80s.