Recent News

Restoration Project for Pickett Plot in Canton Completed - June 2, 2026

Mason Pickett - great-great-grandson of John Lester Pickett - June 3, 2026

Aptly concluding on the 128-year anniversary of the death of Dr. John Columbus Pickett, the multi-year restoration and rejuvenation of the Pickett Family Plot at Riverview Cemetery has come to a close. Initiated by Richard Holt and other members of the extended Holt and Pickett families, the work was primarily done over the span of a one-and-a-half year period between early 2025 and mid 2026, with an interruption caused by renovations of the chapel there into the Cherokee County Drug Screening Lab.

The site had fallen into neglect for many years; the last person buried there was Margaret Holt Pickett in 1922, and as the family moved itself out of the Georgia mountains and into urban Atlanta during the first half of the 20th century, there were no relatives left to keep it's grounds. These issues were exacerbated by Riverview Cemetery's lack of a perpetual care fund.

By the 2010s and 2020s, the site had been so overgrown, that when FindAGrave user dgresh came to record the graves in 2011, he reported that the "stone covered in ivy; best guess at name." While mowing had been done a few times and talks of a restoration project had been in the family for some time, there hadn't been any real action until Richard Holt, a distant cousin of the family, began a long-term restoration and rejuvenation project, which finally concluded yesterday.

What's next? Personally, I think we should make a trip to Talona Baptist Church Cemetery and start work on the Pickett plot there. This time, maybe without almost dying in a Jeep.