The story of Poplar Springs begins with an old Methodist Camp Meeting Ground, a common gathering place for worship in Georgia’s early frontier days. From this camp grew the congregation that would later organize into Poplar Springs Methodist Church. According to records, Fulton Kemp deeded ten acres of land to Jesse Peacock, Wiley Miller, Peter VanLandingham, and Jethro Dean, trustees of the church.

The cemetery surrounding the church speaks volumes about these early families. Twenty interments are documented for the VanLandinghams and thirteen for the Kemps, with the earliest marked burial that of an infant Kemp in 1828. Still, as with many rural cemeteries, the lack of funds meant that countless graves remain either unmarked or undocumented.

The first meetinghouse was likely a simple log structure, as was the custom of the time. In 1859, the present frame sanctuary was built by E. J. Tarpley. According to county history, the church was briefly occupied by Sherman’s troops during the Civil War. Afterward, the church minutes mysteriously disappeared—presumably lost during those turbulent years—and have never been recovered.

The cemetery itself raises as many questions as it answers. With burials dating back nearly 200 years, it reflects a complex social history. Part of the cemetery is enclosed by a fence, reportedly the “white” section, while burials outside the fence were said to belong to African Americans. However, many of the graves outside the fence are relatively modern, making this division puzzling. Traditionally, African Americans in the area established their own churches and cemeteries after the Civil War, so why this mixed arrangement exists here remains unclear.

One especially fascinating feature of the cemetery is the continued presence of wooden grave markers. Rare survivals today, these markers often bear unusual shapes and styles unique to this region of Georgia. They stand as a testament to an older, now-vanished burial tradition and remind us that even in the smallest details, rural cemeteries preserve stories worth remembering. Poplar Springs is a classic mid-19th-century rural sanctuary—simple, elegant, and enduring. While gaps remain in its recorded history, its churchyard and its walls still speak to almost two centuries of Georgia’s past.