An innovation at the time of its founding, Shockoe Hill Cemetery presented an ordered, secular burial ground operated by the city. Land for the site was purchased in 1799, but the city did not open the burial ground until around 1822, the year of its first interment. Located on the north side of town, between 2nd and 4th Streets, it anchored a neighborhood then being populated by the newly established Barton Heights Cemeteries, Hebrew Cemetery, a municipal burying ground for free blacks and slaves, and a potter’s field for poor whites. The city’s poor house was located across the street from the cemetery grounds.
Initially called the New Burying Ground, Shockoe Hill Cemetery spread over four acres enclosed by a brick wall. City surveyor Richard Young employed a grid layout for its design, with decorative plantings throughout the grounds. White Richmonders could buy plots or sections of plots for their families. This enclosed, formal burying ground was closed to Black burials, though it was administered as a single unit with the municipal burying ground for Black burials outside its walls. The first superintendent of this combined “Shockoe Hill Burying Ground” was Susan Le Tellier, widow of the recently deceased poor house keeper. By 1831, Le Tellier informed city council that she had to repeatedly turn away applications for plots by residents living outside of Richmond, as the ordinances at that time restricted the walled cemetery to the families of Richmond citizens alone.
Given such pressures and popularity, the city expanded the cemetery twice — in 1843 and again in 1850 — until it reached its present size of just over twelve acres in 1850. On the eve of that last expansion, the cemetery had accumulated roughly five thousand total burials.
In 1852, a letter from a traveler published in the Southern Literary Messenger noted that “the regular walks, the exact division, the ornamental trees, and the handsome monuments, render this a place of some beauty.” In turn, one local editor advocated for the opening of a public park in the thriving neighborhood, “to arrest the tide which now flows into the Shockoe Hill Burying Ground” purely for pleasure.
During the Civil War, the city leased the poor house to the Confederate government for use as General Hospital Number 1. Confederate soldiers and Union prisoners of war received burial around the cemetery grounds. After the war, the federal government removed the Union burials to Richmond National Cemetery.
Shockoe Hill Cemetery maintained its popularity until the early twentieth century, when it neared capacity and faced increasing competition. In 1904, articles in the Richmond Times-Dispatch declared that the grounds were “seldom visited” and “falling into pitiful decay.” Vandalism and decay continued after highway construction divided the neighborhood from the center of town in the 1950s. Although the cemetery has always been owned and maintained by the city, in 2006, a nonprofit group formed – The Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery – to help care for the site and promote its history. The Friends have raised funds for the cemetery’s upkeep, installed new grave markers throughout the site, organized a series of public tours and cleanup days, and generally advocated for the cemetery’s significance.
Podcast for Ann “Nannie” Caskie (overseas traveler and angel’s friend), 1831-1893. Podcast by Aidan Heffron and Chloe Kindley:
Podcast for Peter Francisco (famed soldier in the Revolutionary War), 1760-1831, by Molly McCoig and Brandon Seal:
Podcast for Howell L. Thomas (physician and graverobber), 1824-1879. Podcast by Bridget Ferguson:
For more information, see:
Chapter 3, “The New Burying Ground,” in Ryan K. Smith, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City (2020)
List of inscriptions on grave markers in Shockoe, produced by Madge Goodrich in 1936
Alice Bohmer Rudd, Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia: Register of Interments, April 10, 1822 – December 31, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: A. Böhmer Rudd, 1960).
Katheryn L. Whittington, “NRHP Report on Shockoe Hill Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia,” 1995. Virginia Department of Historic Resources
Harry Kollatz, Jr., “Some Are Dead, Some Are Living,” Richmond Magazine (July 2010)
Interview with Jeffry Burden, president of Friends of Shockoe HIll Cemetery, HistoryReplaysToday podcast, February 2014
Alyson L. Taylor-White, Shockoe Hill Cemetery: A Richmond Landmark History (History Press, 2017)
Melissa Scott Sinclair, “That Hidden Place,” Richmond Magazine (August 5, 2018)
Jeffry Burden, The Soldiers of Shockoe Hill