Rose Hill

Remembering Rose Hill’s African American Community

This marker at the corner of McLendon Avenue and Candler Park Drive commemorates the site of the Rose Hill/Mayson Subdivision, 1892–1942. It reaffirms a community of hundreds of African American residents who lived in early Edgewood–Candler Park from 1870 to the 1980s. The marker was installed in 2010. Here is its text:

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Back in 1910, when electric lights were still new, James and Sophronia Lattimore and their family lived on old Mayson Avenue North (now Candler Park Drive). Like their neighbors, the Lattimores were working-class African American homeowners. Their neighborhood, the Mayson Subdivision on Rose Hill, stretched from this corner northeastward for almost ten acres.

According to the 1910 Census, Rose Hill’s Black residents worked as porters and chauffeurs, cooks, maids, and laundry workers. In an era of racial segregation, they championed their own school and organized a Masonic-style lodge. When their wooden church burned, they built a stone church that still stands today at 470 Candler Park Drive.

But over the next decades—after Atlanta annexed this former Town of Edgewood district in 1909—the area around Rose Hill changed. Older homes fell to wrecking crews to make room for new subdivisions. Many new house lots could not be sold or rented “to any person of the Negro race.”

In 1922, Asa G. Candler’s Edgewood Park Realty Company gave (for $10.) fifty-four acres around Rose Hill to the City of Atlanta “for park purposes.” The new Candler Park and Golf Course—effectively for Whites only—blocked any expansion for residents of Rose Hill.

“Slum Clearance” on Rose Hill

For another 20 years, living next to Candler Park, the Black residents of Rose Hill held on as one of the few surviving African American neighborhoods north of Atlanta’s main east-west railroad line.

Then came Atlanta’s Slum Clearance Ordinance of 1942. The new codes declared many older structures “nuisances” to be torn down. In short order, the city claimed the lots and demolished all remaining structures in the once-vibrant Rose Hill/Mayson Ave. Subdivision. The hillside was later leveled into the ball fields of Candler Park.