By The Cemetery Detective — Forest Hills Cemetery, St. Elmo / Lookout Mountain foothills (2025 visit)
Forest Hills Cemetery is one of Chattanooga’s oldest and most historically layered burial grounds. Forest Hills was established in 1880, sitting at the foot of Lookout Mountain, and serving generations of local families, veterans (including Civil War interments), and the city’s industrial communities. The cemetery is large (roughly 100 acres with tens of thousands of recorded burials), contains distinctive historic monuments (including a prominent Confederate memorial), and has a documented map maintained by the Forest Hills Cemetery Association. All of these are reasons why a careful, repeatable program of temporal and geospatial documentation is valuable.
Below I describe the independent work I performed at Forest Hills, the same two-part approach I use at other sites: (A) temporal documentation (video with meta timestamps) and (B) spatial precision (GPS tracklog). Then I expand on how I prescribe to use GIS to build layers that make the cemetery data queryable, searchable, and useful for specialized research (for example: mapping all marble stones, all granite monuments, and locating zinc markers).
Why Forest Hills Benefits from this Approach
Forest Hills is a historic community cemetery serving people tied to Chattanooga’s growth. Miners, railroad and ironworkers, Reconstruction-era families, fraternal organizations, and local civic leaders have all been served by Forest Hills Cemetery. Its location near Lookout Mountain and the St. Elmo neighborhood gives it both scenic and historical significance. The scale of the site and the importance of certain monuments mean that a year-by-year visual record plus geospatial layers give historians, genealogists, and municipal stewards a repeatable way to answer questions like: where are all of the Civil War veteran graves, which areas show accelerated stone weathering, or which lots contain zinc markers that are prone to a distinct corrosion pattern.
Temporal Documentation: video drive-throughs and targeted still photography
My video drive-through captures the roads and lanes as a continuous, date-stamped visual record. For Forest Hills I did:
- A slow drive covering primary loops and secondary lanes, filmed at 1080p+ with steady mounting and embedded time-calls at the start and end of each pass.
- Walk-and-shoot segments for notable monuments: the Confederate monument, large marble angels and sculpted figures, mausolea, and any zinc (white-metal) markers I could find. Photographs of inscriptions were captured at high resolution for later transcription. (Zinc markers stand out visually and require different conservation attention than granite or marble.)
Why video + close photos? Video records context of tree cover, sightlines, road surfaces, decorations, and temporary items while still photos capture legible inscriptions and fine detail for transcription and material identification.
Spatial documentation: GPS logging and GIS-ready GPX files
Simultaneously with the video I logged the drive routes using a high-accuracy GPS datalogger (1–5 second sampling). I export GPX tracks and bring them into GIS software (QGIS/ArcGIS). These GPX polylines form the skeleton I use to anchor video timestamps to exact map locations. These datapoints enable a researcher to jump from a map coordinate to the corresponding moment in the video.
I also collect single-point GPS fixes for specific features (e.g., unusual monuments, zinc markers, mausolea, cemetery sign). Each point is given a unique ID and linked to high-resolution photos and a short descriptive note (material, inscription legibility, condition).
Forest Hills maintains an official map and burial records which I use as a reference layer when positioning my features within the cemetery’s section/lot grid.
Building GIS Layers: a reproducible, queryable data model
The value of GIS is not just a pretty map. GIS’ beauty comes from its ability to store attributes and filter/query them. Cemeteries like Forest Hills, benefit from maintaining core layers:
- Base layers
- High-resolution orthophoto (if available), or current aerial basemap.
- Cemetery property boundary and scanned official map (georeferenced PDF).
- Road & Pathway polylines
- Created from GPX tracks; each polyline has attributes:
road_name,drive_direction,record_date,video_file,video_start_time,video_end_time.
- Created from GPX tracks; each polyline has attributes:
- Plot/Section grid (vector polygons)
- Digitized from the cemetery’s official map and/or from on-the-ground GPS corner points. Attributes:
section,lot,availability,notes.
- Digitized from the cemetery’s official map and/or from on-the-ground GPS corner points. Attributes:
- Monument points (the key research layer)
- One point per monument/marker with attributes such as:
feature_ID(unique)name_on_marker(if legible)primary_material(marble,granite,limestone,zinc,bronze,concrete, etc.)secondary_material(base/ornament)marker_type(upright,flat,ledger,obelisk,mausoleum,zinc_tablet)date_erected(if inscribed)inscription_text(full or partial transcription)condition_score(numeric or categorical — e.g., 1–5)photo_refs(filenames, with timestamp)GPS_accuracyandrecorded_bymetadata
- One point per monument/marker with attributes such as:
- Zinc markers — an explicit sub-layer
- I often create a zinc feature class (or a boolean field
is_zinc) because zinc monuments (a.k.a. “white bronze”) were popular 1870–1920 and have specific conservation and provenance stories. Zinc’s patina and brittle mounting methods make them a separate conservation case. Treating them as a distinct layer makes preservation tracking straightforward. (Readers of Forest Hills note a singular or small number of zinc markers among the granite and marble landscape.)
- I often create a zinc feature class (or a boolean field
- Vegetation & tree canopy
- Large trees can obscure inscriptions, damage stones through root action, or alter microclimates that accelerate biological growth on stone. I map specimen trees and canopy cover where relevant to monument condition assessments.
- Historic overlays
- Georeferenced historical maps, insurance plat maps, city directories, and old aerials. These let one detect reinterments, landscape changes, or realignments. Forest Hills’s long history and the movement of some graves across the city is why historical overlays are useful.
Example GIS queries and analyses you can do once layers exist
- “Select all monuments where
primary_material = 'marble'anddate_erected < 1920” — to study Victorian marble weathering patterns. - “Map all
is_zinc = TRUEpoints and buffer 1 meter to assess mounting/settlement issues.” - “Join the monument layer to burial registry tables by
name_on_markerandburial_dateto create a searchable, name-indexed map.” - “Temporal change detection: overlay photos from 2015, 2020, 2025 to automatically flag monuments with new tilt/fallen status.”
- “Slope/DEM analysis: identify plot areas with slope > X degrees where erosion or soil movement threatens stones.”
Practical GIS tips & file management
- Coordinate Reference System (CRS): capture GPS in WGS84 (EPSG:4326), but store and perform local spatial analysis in an appropriate projected CRS for Tennessee (e.g., NAD83 / Tennessee State Plane or UTM zone that minimizes distortion) when you need accurate area/length measurements.
- Attribute templates: use consistent field names (snake_case or camelCase) and controlled vocabularies (e.g., a fixed list of materials) to keep queries reliable.
- Photo & video linking: store media files with filename conventions that match
feature_IDor include timestamps; keep a CSV or GeoPackage attribute that lists the media filenames so a map click can open the photo or jump to the time in the drive-through video. - Backups: keep raw video and original GPX tracks (uncompressed where possible) and create web-friendly derivatives (MP4, simplified GeoJSON/GPX) for publication.
- Public export: consider publishing a sequence of KMZ/GeoJSON files and a CSV index for other researchers along with the site’s permission.
Forest Hills Cemetery: communities and industrial past visible in stone
Walking Forest Hills, you’ll see the social layering in funerary art:
- Veterans’ memorials: there are many veteran markers.
- Industrial families & fraternal stones: the rise of Chattanooga’s manufacturing and rail era is reflected in obelisks, ledger-style stones for prominent families, and many fraternal emblems (Masonic, Woodmen of the World). The materials chosen, often marble for 19th-century Victorian markers and granite later, echo the economics of the era and local stone/transport availability.
- Ethnic and community histories: Forest Hills contains burials from across Chattanooga’s social history, including Reconstruction-era African American sections that document once-segregated burial practices. Such patterns should be recorded sensitively and with reference to local office records.
Mapping these social layers by veteran status, fraternal membership, material type, and erecting date lets researchers visualize how the community’s funerary landscape reflects Chattanooga’s industrial and social history.
Why publish this work on TheCemeteryDetective.com?
A well-organized public archive (video + map + downloadable GPX/GeoJSON + searchable CSV of monuments) does three things:
- Preserves a temporal snapshot (how Forest Hills looked in 2025).
- Provides spatially precise references for genealogists and conservators.
- Enables research queries (e.g., find all zinc markers, list all marble markers erected before 1900, or show areas where canopy cover may be harming stones).
Forest Hills Cemetery, given its founding date, scale, and visible memorial types, is particularly well-suited to this kind of combined preservation work.
Demonstrating what is Possible
A full-scale Temporal and Geospatial Documentation project requires a significant commitment of resources and coordination from cemetery management. My visit to Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga represents a focused effort to demonstrate what is possible when technology and historical preservation meet. During my time in Forest Hills, I recorded a complete visual record using a roof-mounted GoPro camera while simultaneously capturing temporal and geospatial data via GPS. Together, these data form a lasting digital archive. It is a snapshot (video) of the cemetery’s layout, demography, and pathways as they exist today. In the years to come, as landscapes evolve and headstones weather, this record will stand as a vital reference point for researchers, genealogists, and future caretakers dedicated to preserving the memory and material heritage within Forest Hills Cemetery.