I rediscovered a post I'd forgotten as I've been researching spooky places and events for our Halloween page. I'd read about Atlanta's Doll's Head Trail and had heard about it from friends who love hiking. Tom, my youngest son, and I decided to check it out in early 2018.
The South River Brick Company has been closed for over 50 years and its days of making bricks from Georgia red clay are long gone, but its abandoned site has not gone unused. We found this little treasure of a place in East Atlanta this past February. I'd seen photos from friends and other hikers online and waited for a good day to explore it. When the land went unused, a collection of house hold items and trash began to accumulate. A local carpenter, Joel Slaton, envisioned the trail as a community art project using found art. Think about prominent folk artist Howard Finster and his colleagues walking through a forest picking up odds and ends they find and creating art out of it to leave for the next hiker.
Photo Credit: UrbanAllice and Jennifer Graham
You'll see doll heads (thus the name), arms, torsos, bricks, vintage toys, hub caps, bottles, glass, abandoned Halloween plastic pumpkins, and other bits and pieces arranged as pleasingly weird creations. We took a sharpie and left captions and sayings along the trail on objects we found for the next hiker. It can be that simple. We'll be heading back over to the trail when the weather cools down. Worth the walk. Here's an article on Doll's Head by Atlas Obscura.
Our contributions. It helps if you read the rules of how to create found art before you hit the trail. We used a sharpie and left our mark the best we could.
