Finding Miss Emmie

The following is a piece written by Dr. Bob Wilson PhD, a gentleman who has tirelessly researched the history of nearby Milledgeville, Georgia and of Norvell Hardy's life and times there.  Following is a link to a Companion Page which includes directions to Westview Cemetery in Atlanta as well as a photo tour leading the way to Miss Emmie's burial location.

Success! The burial place of Ollie's mother is found. This past Friday, on a reasonable hunch, I drove to Atlanta and took the MARTA train to West Lake stop. I disembarked and hiked some distance to Westview Cemetery--a gigantic place. I stopped at the office and told a woman there that I was looking for an "Emily" or "Emmie Jackson"or "Hardy. After some initial confusion, she pulled out a reference to "Emily Norvell Hardy," Ollie's mother. She then gave me a map of the cemetery and I realised that my destination was on the far side of the place, at least half a mile away. Ollie's mother is entombed in the largest mausoleum I've ever seen. It's called Westview Abbey, and was built around 1942 in Gothic style. The mausoleum chapel looks exactly like a 12th century European Gothic chapel.

I wandered through beautiful marble halls with the crypts stacked up to the ceiling. The extractor fan on the ceiling needed repairing, so the whole room was slightly airless, magnificent, awesome, creepy and claustrophobic all at the same time. So, I had the location of her crypt--Tier EE, #1011--but since there are no numbers written on the walls, it was meaningless to me. I was alone in this building, just wandering up and down lengthy corridors, looking at names. I finally heard a sound, and found a caretaker doing some work. I showed him my information, and he immediately took me to her crypt.

She's located on the basement level, the floors were slippery from all the humidity and rain, and he was afraid I'd fall. Her crypt was five tiers up, just below the ceiling, making it hard to decipher. We determined, however, that it read "Emily N. Hardy 1860-1948". So I learned some things: one is that, unsurprisingly, she had given up the name "Jackson," and had gone back to the name of her second husband "Oliver Hardy Sr." Secondly, the year of her death, which I had previously not known, shows that she lived to the ripe old age of 88. I'm going to try to find out the day and month, and then search for obits in the Atlanta papers.

Any Hardy fans who want to visit his mother's grave: go to Westview Cemetery, on the west side of Atlanta, then to Westview Abbey. The mausoleum is at the opposite end from the main gate. The location is "Tier EE, # 1101." Emmie seems to be all-alone down there--no family in adjoining crypts, and a long way from Grovetown.

 

Click here for "A Tour of Westview Abbey"                                                                                                                                                                                                  

 

 

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