If you’ve been wondering about something in your community, Ask The Times is your place to get answers. The following question was submitted by a reader and answered through the efforts of our news staff.
The new Cherokee Bluffs Park on Blackjack Road in south Hall County is now open and is a nice facility. There is what appears to be a fenced-in cemetery with one grave and a small blank headstone on top of the hill near the front of the park. Who is buried there?
Assistant Hall County Administrator Marty Nix said local historian Teresa Owens’ research determined the grave belongs to Thomas Sanford Sloan, who was born in 1800 in Spartanburg, S.C., and died in Hall County in July 1876.
Nix said that Owens’ research indicated Sloan designed mills and likely moved to Hall County in the early 1830s.
When Cherokee Bluffs Park was being built, Nix said Hall County wanted to “be respectful of the cemetery” and put a fence around it. He said the county hopes to in the future put a historic marker at the site to memorialize Sloan.
“I think it’s a part of Hall County history,” Nix said.
Part of that history, according to Nix, is that Hall County was “the frontier” back in the 1830s.
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