Richmond Cemeteries

Exploring Richmond Virginia’s Historic Burial Grounds

Author: RyanSmith

  • Maury Cemetery’s moving graves and flooding

    The City of Richmond’s Maury Cemetery is in the news this week for all the wrong reasons. The local news at WTVR CBS 6 reported on one family’s disappointment at the treatment of a grandmother’s recent interment. Apparently, the casket (and its aboveground marker) have been moved by workers to different plots in the cemetery…

  • Fall 2024 student projects

    Congratulations to the students in our HIST 490 Seminar in History: Richmond Cemeteries course at VCU in the Fall 2024 semester, who completed a range of fascinating studies as part of their capstone undergraduate course. Here is a list of the students’ paper topics: “A Legacy Of Compassion: The Life of Dr. Ali Hossaini Sr.”…

  • Now hiring

    This past summer, the City of Richmond quietly received title to Evergreen and East End Cemeteries, which had been in limbo since the collapse of their previous owner, the Enrichmond Foundation. Months prior to those transfers, the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation has been engaging with the Friends of East End Cemetery and other…

  • New! From stonecarver J. Henry Brown

    One of the great “Treasures from the Collections of the Library of Virginia” is the set of 12 order books from the J. Henry Brown Monuments company dating from 1899 through 1920. Brown established his Richmond shop in 1885, where he specialized in creating gravestones. His order books contain thousands of detailed entries, documenting markers…

  • The burying ground and the billboard

    On Monday, February 5, I received a distressing message from Lenora McQueen, descendant and key advocate for the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground. Through a review of recent photographs of the site with archaeologist and ally Ellen Chapman, the two saw that VCU Health had recently placed an advertisement on one of the two billboard…

  • St. James Cemetery event, 11/30

    This Fall 2023 semester, the Richmond Cemetery Collaboratory (recently renamed from the East End Cemetery Collaboratory) has engaged with St. James Cemetery in Varina just east of Richmond. The governing organization of the cemetery is the Star of Benevolence Society, which is connected to a historic lodge and schoolhouse on the property at St. James…

  • Pajka’s Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe

    Sharon Pajka, the prolific Richmond-region author and cemetery friend, releases a new book today. Titled The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe, it has an inviting cover photograph of the Allan grave markers in Shockoe Hill Cemetery. Sharon explains: “My book includes a collection of thirty-seven memorials, nineteen cemeteries and five states, plus Washington, D.C.…

  • East End/Evergreen Cemeteries Community Conversation

    The wheels of justice are still turning slowly for the Enrichmond Foundation’s accountability following its mismanagement of Evergreen Cemetery, East End Cemetery, and broader community relations. In the first half of 2023, various news outlets have reported that the fiscal agent is apparently under investigation by the FBI and the Virginia state attorney general’s office.…

  • Liberty and Death and conservation in St. John’s Churchyard

    On Thursday, May 25, at 7:00pm, I will be delivering a talk at St. John’s Church for the Historic St. John’s Church Foundation’s Walter W. Craigie Speaker Series. Titled, “Liberty and Death in St. John’s Churchyard,” the talk will offer an overview of the history of the churchyard, which is the oldest surviving burial ground…

  • Woodland Cemetery open house

    These are exciting days for Woodland Cemetery. Descendants and volunteers there have transformed the site under the leadership of the Woodland Restoration Foundation, with bigger plans to come. They invite the public to celebrate with them and learn more at a family-friendly open house to be held at the cemetery on Saturday, May 20, starting…