09/05/2026
This week’s is both a lesson in symbolism and a bit of Athens trivia! We are visiting the shared memorial of Oliver and Mary Prince at Rose Hill Cemetery down in Macon, Georgia.
As you may have guessed, Prince Avenue gets its name from Oliver and Mary Prince. In 1836, Oliver Hillhouse Prince ended his Macon, Georgia-based career in law and promotion of the Georgia Railroad, at which time he retired to Athens and purchased a tract of over 450 acres west of downtown in the present-day Prince Avenue area.
The following year, both he and his wife, Mary, died in a shipwreck off the North Carolina coast. The ship, called the S.S. Home, capsized during a hurricane, and the remains were never recovered. They left behind two children: Oliver, Jr., 15, and Sarah, 13. Both children eventually married and raised several children of their own.
The acreage was tied up in the Prince family estate for nearly a decade before the administrator of the estate had the land resurveyed in 1846 and offered it up for sale in smaller tracts. It was divided into 36 lots, which were bought up and built upon by wealthy families over the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Though their remains lie in the Atlantic Ocean, this Gothic-style gravestone was commissioned by Oliver, Jr. and Sarah and placed at Rose Hill in remembrance of their beloved parents. It features a cross cercelee or anchored cross, an exaggerated version of the cross moline, with a dogwood blossom at its center.
The forked ends of the cross are symbolic of strength, stability and being “anchored in the truth of the gospel,” and the eight points of those forked ends symbolize the eight beatitudes.
The dogwood blossom symbolizes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, with the dent in the end of each petal symbolizing the nails through the hands and feet and the central cluster symbolizing the crown of thorns.
