History tells us that the church you see above was built in 1886, though the congregation itself was organized in August 1861 in an old schoolhouse on this site. One of the elders at the dedication was Rev. John T. Kimball, who had been a member of Towliga Baptist Church, licensed to preach there in August 1845. His obituary in the Jackson Argus (July 21, 1899) described “a long and useful career,” while another article (June 5, 1885) declared: “There is not a living man who could command a larger congregation and control it better than he.”

The County Line Cemetery is expansive, with graves dating back to the early 1860s—each stone a piece of local history. Among them is Francis Edalgo (1835–1872), whose story takes an unexpected turn. Born Francisco Hidalgo in Mexico, he became the adopted son of Major Henry Burroughs Holliday, a man with a remarkable military and civic career. Major Holliday, originally from South Carolina, served in the Cherokee War, the Mexican War, and later the Civil War. While in Mexico in 1846 with the “Fannin Avengers,” Holliday encountered a recently orphaned 12-year-old boy, Francisco Hidalgo. He brought the boy back to Georgia, adopting him as his own.

Francis, as he came to be known, married Martha Freeman and began farming near Jenkinsburg. Despite having two young children, he enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861, serving until the surrender at Greensboro. He returned home, had two more children, but died of tuberculosis in 1873—tragically young, like his stepmother Alice (d. 1866) and his much younger adopted stepbrother, John Henry “Doc” Holliday, who died in 1887 at age 36.

Local lore claims Doc attended Francis’s funeral, along with his cousin Martha Holliday—Doc’s reputed lost love—who later became Sister Mary Melanie Holliday of the Sisters of Mercy. She served faithfully for 56 years and, according to family tradition, partly inspired the character Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind.

What a story—and a reminder that these quiet rural cemeteries hold the keys to some of the most fascinating and unexpected chapters of Georgia’s history.