The Red Hills Region is not a formal geographic area. When the Red Hills Community Cemetery (RHCC) Board searched for prospective properties for the cemetery we focused our efforts within what we understood to be the Red Hills Region in Leon, Jefferson, and Gadsden Counties. At the time, the best map we could find was the following from Wikipedia credited to a source identified as “Noles 1984”:
The Red Hills region is more or less situated within the Tifton Uplands geomorphology district. Subsequent research by RHCC member Dana Bryan revealed that the southern boundary of that district comprises the Ochlockonee River which runs through what is now Lake Talquin. The Red Hills Cemetery, in fact, lies within the Apalachicola Delta geomorphology district which comprises the eroded sands of a paleo-shoreline when sea levels were higher about 11,700 years ago. The soils are deep sands rather than the clays of the Red Hills.
As the Ochlockonee River eroded the northern edge of the ancient shoreline, small tributary streams cut deep swales producing the landscape of today. Our cemetery sits upon one of a series of terraces carved by these swales as shown here:
We are bounded on the north by a 40-foot bluff above the Lake Talquin floodplain and on the west by a 40 to 60-foot deep ravine that is one of the steepest in the area. This rugged terrain has limited past exploitation leaving some immense trees that naturalist Karen Rose has estimated to be as much as 200 to 300 years old. We are setting aside the ravine and the steep bluffs above the lake in a conservation easement.
However, as those of us who reside here know, the Red Hills is a cultural region as much as a geomorphological one. And the RHCC is poised to serve the region through care for the land and for the community.