The main cemetery in Sparta was established on property deeded to the town in 1806. Its burials illustrate a common nineteenth-century pattern of migration to the area, as settlers from New England and Virginia moved south and west through the Carolinas and into Georgia. Notable burials include Methodist Bishop George Foster Pierce, president of Wesleyan College in Macon and of Emory College in Oxford, Georgia; prominent nineteenth-century statesmen Dr. William Terrell and Gen. Henry Mitchell; and veterans of American wars dating back to the Revolution. The cemetery also contains examples of funerary art representative of architectural styles of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.