Category: Hollywood

  • No More Confederate Flags at Hollywood

    Rex Springston just published a useful investigative report on the Hollywood Cemetery Company’s changing display policies regarding Confederate flags, available here at the Virginia Mercury. It follows up on his earlier piece from 2020 written in the midst of the protests against Confederate monuments, where he reported that Hollywood had “temporarily” removed the once-ubiquitous rebel…

  • Attack on Hollywood Cemetery

    Grave vandalism has a long history. Richmond’s prized Hollywood Cemetery was even targeted during the Civil War, where in June 1863, “two china vases, containing bouquets, were deposited upon a grave, and stolen almost as soon as left,” and reporters heard “of plants being torn up by the roots, and every species of sacrilege perpetrated…

  • Hollywood during quarantine

    Last week, I made it out of the house and up to Hollywood Cemetery. This is the time of the semester that I usually walk my class through the cemetery on a field trip. But of course there is no opportunity for a field trip this semester. So I tried to recreate the experience as…

  • The Charlottesville anniversary and the Monument Avenue commission report

    We approach the one-year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville which left one dead, over thirty injured, and a nation scarred and seared. The purported prompt to the rally was the city’s decision to remove its Robert E. Lee equestrian monument (erected in 1924) from a public park. The horrifying events of…

  • Charlottesville

    Heartbreaking weekend in Charlottesville, and everywhere in America. I’ve got smart friends who saw this coming, but I have to say that I did not. My work among cemetery activists of all political persuasions and backgrounds indicated to me a tremendous amount of general goodwill. That must still be true in most areas, but it…

  • New start/a little history part 2

    Continuing my history of my historical website focusing on historical sites, for 2015: On March 10, 2015, I publicly stated that I was “Taking the plunge now – I have started writing an overall history of Richmond’s historic cemeteries. Hopefully will lead to upgrades throughout the site here. So far, I have rough drafts of…