On Saturday, 9/13/2025, the Richmond Cemetery Collaboratory and its community partners celebrated the release of a walking tour guide for Richmond’s historic Barton Heights Cemeteries. The cemeteries themselves, founded in 1815 by a society of free black Richmonders, do not have welcome signage or tour support. In an effort to provide a resource to area teachers and interested visitors, Sara Wilson, an architectural history graduate student at the University of Virginia, worked with the Descendants Council of Greater Richmond and Collaboratory faculty to produce the walking tour.
The walking tour contains information on fourteen different stops across the cemetery grounds. It highlights the stories of descendants like Janith Libron and Denise Lester as well as grave marker artisanship and the neighborhood’s context. Sara chose to produce an easily-accessible .pdf file of the tour materials, available here for free download, printing, and distribution.
Sara did a great job leading a sample tour with those materials on Saturday. Highlights of the tour included an opening invocation from Janith Libron as well as reflections from community leader Carmen Foster on the modern professional networks connected to families buried in the grounds. Carmen’s memories of Dr. Daniel Williams Jr. were vivid and inspiring. Kimberly Jackson, the City of Richmond’s Community Engagement Specialist for the cemeteries, was also present for the tour. Accompanying her was a member of the grounds crew that is doing excellent work these days to keep the cemeteries as tidy as possible. The city is hosting regular volunteer clean-up days at the Barton Heights Cemeteries, including one this Saturday, 9/20 starting at 9:00am.
Loretta Tillman, a member of the Descendants Council who mentored Sara in her work on the walking tour, saw an opportunity to build on all this momentum by renewing the Whit Monday commemorations that were part of the life of the cemeteries, most recently during the early 2000s. Hopefully the tour we now have in hand can help facilitate such engagement going forward.
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