Sir Moses Montefiore Cemetery was founded in 1886 by orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, a group whose arrival marked the third major phase in Jewish community building in the United States. These eastern Europeans tended not to assimilate into the congregations established earlier such as Richmond’s German-oriented Beth Ahabah or the older, Sephardic-oriented Beth Shalome,…

In 1791, two years after the founding of congregation Beth Shalome in Richmond, Isaiah Isaacs deeded a rectangular portion of his garden on Middle Street (now Franklin Street) to nine trustees. It was “to be used solely for the purpose of a burying ground” for “the Jews now residing in the City of Richmond” and…

Woodland’s story began when the Greenwood Memorial Association formed in 1891. Led by William M. T. Forrester, who also served as secretary of the Independent Order of St. Luke, the association purchased thirty acres of farmland known as the “Hedge Plain” on the northern edge of the city for use as a cemetery. The site…

The city’s second African burial ground, now known as the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground, has a complex history. In 1816, following protests by free people of color in Richmond, the city finally closed the “Burial Ground for Negroes” in Shockoe Bottom and opened a new burial ground on the northern edge of town for…

Maury and Mount Olivet Cemeteries are located on the south side of the James River, within an easy walk to Forest Hill Park. Initially, the settlement across the falls from Richmond had been known as Rocky Ridge, later renamed Manchester after becoming a town in 1769. Burials in this busy area took place on scattered…

I began teaching classes on Richmond’s historic cemeteries and leading occasional tours starting in 2010. At the time, there were a few studies available of individual cemeteries, with most of the attention focused on Hollywood Cemetery. But with so many activists and stewards transforming the city’s network of burial grounds, it struck me that there…

For a long time, Virginians expressed a preference for burial on their own private land. With the colonists’ initial dispersal from Jamestown in the early 1600s, families and servants began a tradition of burying on home properties. This tradition would compete with authorities’ insistence on centralized churchyard burials. In 1724, the minister Hugh Jones lamented…