The Murchison Family Legacy
By Deborah Clark
After 16-year-old Alma Murchison was laid to rest at noon on September 22, 1907, her four brothers kept vigil throughout the night at her graveside. Alma was the only daughter of Frank and Sallie Murchison and hers was the first burial at what would become Pinecrest Cemetery in Vidalia.
Now, 115 years after Alma’s death, because of a recent gift, the Murchison family will be linked once again to Pinecrest.
There are hundreds of stories like Alma’s about the residents of Pinecrest, Vidalia’s largest cemetery. The historic site is the resting place of the founding fathers of Vidalia, as well as those who contributed to the community as members of the clergy, the medical profession, as educators, bankers and business owners, the military, and in many other capacities.
The site that would later be known as Pinecrest Cemetery was purchased in 1907 by the Vidalia City Council after the community’s original burial ground next to the Primitive Baptist Church on Church Street neared capacity. The new, approximately nine-acre parcel was initially called “Vidalia City Cemetery.” Now, the cemetery is spread over nearly 30 acres and contains over 4,000 graves.
Pinecrest Committee II
Pinecrest Cemetery is inextricably woven into the fabric of the community, and its past and its future are the concern of an energetic group of volunteers who want to see the cemetery honored and preserved.
John Ladson, who has deep roots in the Vidalia Community and is invested in the area’s history, has spearheaded Pinecrest Cemetery Committee II. The main purpose of the committee is to pick up where the Pinecrest Committee I, established in 1984, left off and to reinvigorate local interest in the cemetery.
The group Ladson heads is made up of citizens from diverse backgrounds, including librarians, researchers, builders, and others possessing specific skills to aid the current effort. The Committee also includes a local attorney and historian, Charles Andrew, who was a part of the ambitious and highly successful Pinecrest Cemetery campaign in the 1980s, as well as local funeral home owner Ron Hall who recently initiated a fundraising campaign to repair and improve the roads at the cemetery.
“We are standing on Ron’s shoulders,” said Committee member Harry Moses. “He is the one who Jump started this new effort.”
This Committee had the work of the first Committee as a building block, but there was still so much about Pinecrest that remained to be discovered and resolved. “We knew so little about the history of Pinecrest when we started,” Ladson said, noting that Andrew has been invaluable in researching records on the cemetery, including the conveyance of plots.
Andrew has also facilitated the creation of a map that provides an updated version of the cemetery’s overall layout, as well as identification of the ownership of specific sections. He spent countless hours digging into courthouse records to determine the chain of ownership at Pinecrest. Many of the families who purchased land at Pinecrest have died out or left the area; but now, through Andrews’ efforts, many of the mysteries of who owns what are beginning to be solved. The hope is that one day this information will assist the Committee in developing a digitized cemetery directory so that families and visitors can pinpoint specific graves.
The Committee’s tasks have also included acquiring quitclaim deeds from previous owners of various sections of the cemetery in order to move forward with plans to upgrade and maintain the cemetery. The City of Vidalia owns the core area of the cemetery, including the common areas, which have been deeded to the existing Trust for which the City Council members are trustees. Most of the burial plots within the cemetery have been sold and are owned by the families who originally purchased the plots.
The Murchison Family Gift
As members of the Committee attempted to tie up the loose ends of ownership of portions of the cemetery not owned by the City of Vidalia, they reached out to the Murchison family, which is highly identified with Pinecrest.
After the City of Vidalia established the cemetery, private developers made adjacent expansions that accommodated lot sales, Ladson said in a narrative on the history of the cemetery. “The Murchison family, who opened and operated Vidalia’s first funeral home, led the initial expansion toward the north.” In 1919 W. J. “Will” Murchison purchased 8.96 acres from Silas B. Meadows and, in 1941, J.L. Tollison and C.T. McCorkle purchased 6 ½ acres from Henry McLemore. By 1944 this southern section was yielding lot sales.
Ladson writes that during this period, Tollison, who operated a funeral home with McCorkle, sold his land interest to his partner in early 1942. At some point P. LeRoy Meadows, who owned land adjoining the cemetery to the East, developed a small section for burial plots as well. “To complete the amalgamation of properties that now comprise Pinecrest, J. Frank Darby, Sr., in 1930, purchased 6.49 acres from Alice Herring,” the narrative states. This land was located along the western boundary and a portion was reserved for the Darby family’s private burial grounds.
Ladson attempted to contact Will Murchison’s daughter, Frances Murchison Pulliam, about a quitclaim deed on a portion of the cemetery in her ownership, but Mrs. Pulliam was in poor health and passed away before progress could be made. Mrs. Pulliam’s daughters, Julie Pulliam of Athens, Susan Pulliam Wooller of Atlanta, and Mary Anne Pulliam Plunkett of Augusta, stepped in to respond to Ladson’s request.
“It was absolutely what Mother would have wanted,” said Mrs. Wooller of the family’s gift. Things just fell into place. As the daughters inventoried their mother’s belongings, they ran across a collection pertaining to Murchison Funeral Home and the Murchison family. They contacted Ladson to ask where this collection of documents and photographs might be housed in Vidalia so that they could be shared with the community.
Ladson, whose father established the renowned Ladson Genealogical Library in Vidalia, shared with Mrs. Wooller that the renovation of the Vidalia Library will include an area specifically for the Genealogical Library. The section will be climate controlled specifically for the preservation of irreplaceable historical material. Until the Library is complete, the collection could be housed in the current Ladson Library on Church Street. The sisters agreed and soon they appeared at Ladson’s office with boxes and boxes of historic memorabilia, much of which had come from the Murchison Funeral Home.
The Enterprising Murchisons
A narrative written by former Advance columnist Ray Tapley outlined the fascinating history of the Murchison family and their contributions to a fledgling Vidalia community. The family’s local history began with James Frank Murchison who moved to Vidalia in 1906 and opened the Vidalia Buggy Company in a wooden building on Meadows Street.
With their buggy business, the Murchisons were likely called upon for a number of transportation duties, including assisting families at funerals. In those days, friends and relatives prepared bodies for burial and this task was usually performed in the home of the deceased.
The Murchison sons — Charles, Koran, Will and Howard — decided to expand the family business to include the services of embalming and Koran went to Augusta to study at the Platt Embalming School.
When Koran boarded the Georgia and Florida train, he was carrying only a suitcase, his brother Will recalled in an interview in 1981. When he returned home, Koran was carrying embalming equipment and a fold-up cooling board that was used to prepare a corpse for burial. He had all he needed to start a new business.
Like doctors of the time, Koran Murchison made house calls. He not only served the local community but also embalmed bodies as far away as Claxton, McRae and Hazlehurst. Later, the Murchisons began to make caskets, and eventually built their own horse-drawn hearse. This hearse was replaced with a motorized vehicle, and by 1927 the Murchisons owned a newer model vehicle advertised in The Advance as a “limousine funeral car service.” The ad was signed: Murchison Undertaking Company, telephone 36 or 92, Vidalia, GA.”
After the death of Koran in 1944, Will continued the business that would become Murchison Funeral Home. In 1937, the business moved to a building on the south side of East First Street, mid-block between Church and Jackson streets. It was there that the funeral home celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1956. In 1964, the business was sold to Julian Ouzts. After her husband’s death in 1972, Twila Ouzts operated the business until she sold it to her business partner Howell Dixon, Jr., in 1986. The business was sold once again and eventually closed under its new ownership.
The last of the Murchison brothers, William Johnson Murchison, or “Mr. Will,” died 10 days before his 94th birthday in 1981.
What Is Next for Pinecrest?
Since it was established, Pinecrest has been governed and maintained by diverse parties, Ladson pointed out. “Maintenance became problematic such that by the 1960s it was a matter of public concern which coincided with the formation of the Vidalia Beautification Commission. Eventually, the cemetery fell under the Commission’s auspices, an arrangement which led to improved maintenance and oversight.” But by 1984 legal and political issues dictated a different approach and a new committee was appointed to study the condition of the cemetery.
Over a period of several years, the Pinecrest Cemetery Committee I accomplished several objectives, including the creation of the Pinecrest Perpetual Cemetery Trust with the Mayor and City Council as trustees and the Vidalia Beautification Commission as an advisory body. During their tenure, some $135,000 was raised for the Trust corpus with the interest only to be used by the City to fund Pinecrest maintenance.
In addition, they acquired through donation and purchase the undeveloped portions of the Murchison land and land from James F. Darby, Jr., which was deeded to the Trust and/or the City. A master plan was developed to expand lot sales and the old iron arch was relocated to the present entrance and was landscaped with new gates. The current configuration of Pinecrest is the legacy of this 1984 Committee.
By 2021, when the second Pinecrest Committee formed, the infrastructure of the cemetery had deteriorated. The master plan for developing the vacant cemetery acreage was never carried out, and the existing Trust had become dysfunctional. The Vidalia Beautification Commission has been deactivated, so no advisory body is now in place.
Ladson credited the City’s ongoing maintenance efforts that involve mowing the common areas, removing overgrowth and fixing potholes in the roads. “But there is no cohesiveness of operation,” Ladson said.
“We have been building toward this for the past year,” Ladson said of the new Committee’s mission to work with the City to address conditions at the cemetery and to plan for its future maintenance and management.
“First, we had to focus on the cemetery’s history and determine what is out there. We had to get quitclaim deeds to lay the groundwork for improvements. Roads are paramount, new gates, fencing, lighting, a directory that is accurate and digitized All of that takes money — an estimated $200,000 for road work alone — and now we are turning our focus to funding. That starts with fund-raising,” Ladson said. The Committee is now in the process of identifying prospective donors ahead of a spring fund-raising event.
Additionally, the Committee considers public participation in Pinecrest as a vital component in its future. Among the Committee’s tasks will be the formation of a citizen advisory board to guide the cemetery’s future maintenance and preservation. The Committee also plans to launch a website to profile the historic site’s value not only as a community icon but also as a catalyst for cemetery tourism that is popular with genealogists and others seeking to research their family roots.
“We are not coming from a position of equality. The City owns and manages Pinecrest. We have no authority outside of what the City grants us,” Ladson said. The Committee will not attempt to address perpetual care, but it is hoped that with citizen input that Pinecrest will be continue to be maintained, he said.
While the City owns the common areas at Pinecrest and the Murchison property has been quitclaimed to the Trust, the portion of the cemetery owned by the Tollison family has not yet been resolved, but the Committee is focused on achieving this. “One of our immediate goals is common ownership and management,” Ladson said.
Moses added, “Part of the bigger picture with our Committee is that we want to try and awaken the City government to the fact that Pinecrest is for the living, not just for those who have passed. The Pinecrest Cemetery Trust is an obvious path forward that might eventually include other city cemeteries, but we still have a way to go.”
Ladson said that visitors may just come to Pinecrest to find a grave, but they if find a park-like place, they may take the time to see the rest of the cemetery and that will connect them to the community. “One thing about Pinecrest is its tranquil setting with nice, rolling topography. It has a lot of potential where an oasis area with a pond and benches might be created.”
Moses noted, “One thing I never thought I would consider for a cemetery is a QR code.” The potential for digitizing information on the cemetery that visitors can access to locate and obtain information on burials is another potential project. “Every grave out there has a story,” Moses reflected. Developing a website and a social media presence are the obvious path forward. “The opportunity to tie this into a package is in front of us now,” he said.
As they continue to work on the real estate aspects of Pinecrest, the Committee is simultaneously branching into other projects like soliciting stories about the people buried at Pinecrest. These stories may be used in an online format to help visitors learn about Pinecrest burials.
Ladson added, “There is a common axiom that history repeats itself, and this applies to Pinecrest. Not unlike 1984, the cemetery has issues which need attention and a new approach.” He noted that most of the town’s history can be found in the stories of those interred at Pinecrest. “While its grounds provide a place of rest and serenity for perhaps 4,000 citizens who have passed on, they also have much to offer the living and should be protected, preserved and cared for.”
