Old City Cemetery

Lynchburg's Old City Cemetery sits at the foot of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It is a place of such peace, beauty, and tranquility that it touches the soul.

It is a place of rest, eternal rest for so many figures passing through the history of this fair city.

To stroll the walkways of this sacred land is to travel in time through Lynchburg’s remarkable history and pay homage to the 20,000 souls who rest there. The tour begins at 401 Taylor Street, just up the 5th street hill from downtown.

The first thing to catch our attention is the official Virginia Historical Highway Marker which is a history lesson in itself. A quick reading of the marker informs us that the cemetery was “established as a public burial ground in 1806 on land donated by John Lynch, the founder of Lynchburg”.

Passing the curving red brick walls and driving through the gates, we feel a quiet and peace descend on us and no reminder is needed that we are on hallowed ground.

We have entered the home of slaves and soldiers, paupers and professionals, politicians and prostitutes and everything in between. The twenty six acres of Old City Cemetery is owned by the City of Lynchburg and managed by the Southern Memorial Association (SMA).

The Association solicits funds for the cemetery upkeep and management (all from private sources), works with volunteers and, with the city, supports three salaried SMA staff and three groundskeepers.

Lynchburg’s Black Heritage Tombstones

About 15,000 of the cemetery residents are African Americans although at the time that many of their hearts beat their last beat, they were just Africans; freedom for blacks was still decades in the future.

For the first hundred feet beyond the gates, off to the right and left, in the oldest part of the cemetery, we meet several black families who made their mark on Lynchburg’s history.

It’s hard to believe how these people could be neighbors in death and yet so apart in life. Meet Agnes and Lizzie Langley, mother and daughter, who ran a sporting house on Commerce Street in the mid to late 1800’s. They were both free blacks, mulattos as some described them, and they were rich. Lizzie, when she died in 1891 was the third richest black woman in Lynchburg.

In death, Agnes and Lizzie’s neighbors are none other than the Cabell family, one of the bluest of blue bloods in Lynchburg’s early history.

In the Cabell plot we find a black woman, with the distinguished name of Virginia Marie Cabell Randolph who died in 1962 at the age of 86. She is buried with her parents in the Cabell plot.

Her mark on Lynchburg included 30 years of teaching elementary school, establishment of a Community House where she directed many cultural and educational activities and her youth program evolved into the first boy and girl scout program for black children in Lynchburg.

It would be an interesting bit of research to find out how a black lady got the Cabell and Randolph names and ended up with her parents in the Cabell family plot in the Old City Cemetery.

A few feet beyond the gravesite of Virginia Randolph is none other than Blind Billy, a black fife player and street musician. Billy died in 1855, six years before the start of the civil war.

It seems that Blind Billy’s music was so sweet and pure that he was often hired to perform at private parties in the homes of prominent Lynchburgers and led many parades through town.

He was so beloved by the citizenry that his freedom was bought and he died a free man. His gravesite is easy to find…look for the broken fife on the tombstone.

On the left side of the road, we find a beautiful monument of a kneeling angel, keeping watch over two year old Emmett Hamilton Jefferson.

His father was a waiter at Lynchburg’s Union Depot.

A few feet beyond is the gravesite of Anica “Mammy” Mitchell who was a “faithful and beloved” servant of the Moore family for 43 years. The “Mammy” was a unique southern institution which in today’s world, would be called an au pair or nanny.

A “Mammy” in antebellum Lynchburg was a cherished member of many prominent families and there are numerous gravesites in the Old City Cemetery that attest to this relationship.

A few steps further we come to Jacob Majors who died at the age of 77 in 1864. He was a black free man who distinguished himself as a carpenter and was hired in 1844 to convert the Court Street Theater into an African Baptist Church.

He was a faithful member and deacon in the church until his death.

The six black residents of Old City Cemetery profiled above are a good cross section of the black residents of Lynchburg who both served and shaped the character of this fair city but they are hardly unique. As we stroll the grounds, we will encounter many, many diverse black residents who made their mark on Lynchburg.

There is Frank Trigg, born a slave in the governor’s mansion in Richmond; died a retired college professor.

There is Squire Higgenbotham, the first operator and owner of Lynchburg’s black funeral home.

There is Miss Willie Hayes, whose son was the first black pharmacist in Lynchburg.

There is Julia Branch, well-known midwife and baby nurse who tended the most prominent Lynchburg families.

The Confederates

The city of Lynchburg had a remarkable role in the civil war, or “War of Northern Aggression” as some around here tend to call it.

If we drive on a few hundred feet more, we come to a beautiful old archway on our left. Pulling over to the side of the road, we dismount our car and go through that arch into a special section of the Old City Cemetery. This is the Confederate Section.

Walking through the archway, we see a kiosk with the name, unit and gravesite location of 2200 Confederate soldiers from 14 states who now reside inside the boxwood perimeter.

Each soldier’s name, unit and gravesite location were placed on this kiosk in 1995.

Between 1904 and 1915, the ladies of the Lynchburg Confederate Memorial Association marked a little over 90% of the graves in the Confederate Section with a small white marble headstone.

Each soldier’s initials and an abbreviation of his military unit were placed on the stones. It wasn’t until 1995, 80 years later, that the names and other data were posted at the kiosk.

Walking along the pathway toward the brick wall, we pass Yankee Square on the right, just beyond the kiosk and just before the obelisk monument to the 14 states.

In 1904 when the ladies started marking the graves in the Confederate Section, they thought Yankee Square was a mass grave and they marked it accordingly with a single monument.

Archeological research at the site revealed orderly rows of discrete graves thus disproving the mass grave idea. Yankee Square was named as such because it was supposed to have been reserved for union soldiers however, union prisoners who died were buried alongside confederate soldiers and many of the smallpox victims of the war years ended up in Yankee Square. About 1866, the union soldiers who were buried there were moved to the Poplar Grove National Cemetery at Petersburg VA by the Federal Government.

Apparently the feds didn’t want their boys sharing eternity with a bunch of Johnny Rebs.

There was an actual smallpox lot although its exact location is still undetermined. It is thought to lie somewhere between sites 186, 190, 194, 198, 202 and where the Pest House now sits.

Twenty nine soldiers who died of smallpox between 1863 and 1864 are thought to be buried somewhere in the vicinity.

Directly across from the obelisk is site 178, a real mass grave for 50 soldiers, marked with a single monument. Way back in the 1900’s, this site had walkways and flower beds on it and the ladies didn’t want to disturb its beauty by installing 50 individual gravestones. It seems the flowers won the war at site 178.

The marble obelisk was built in 1869 by the Ladies Memorial Association and is the oldest Confederate monument in the State of Virginia, a monument to the fourteen states and their soldiers who are buried here.

A little beyond the obelisk is an impressive domed cupola, a “speakers' belvedere” and “Veterans' Bench” built by the Southern Memorial Association.

Lynchburg rarely gets hurricane strength storms but in 1993, one came through that actually toppled the Speakers' Belvedere and wiped out most of the sugar maples that had been planted in the Confederate Section.

Pests in the House

Going back to the car and driving around the curve we come to a small, pretty, white building on the left, opposite the Old City Cemetery Center, not much larger than a big storage shed.

It is one of the five “house” museums located on the cemetery grounds. This one has a fearsome past. No one ever wanted to enter the dreaded Pest House, short for “House of Pestilence”. The pestilence in this case was smallpox.

During the civil war years, 102 soldiers who entered the Pest House never left, at least not alive. They are buried a few feet away and a monument to their memory is seen near the entrance to the Confederate Section.

It wasn’t only smallpox however. During nineteenth-century Lynchburg, in addition to smallpox, residents who contracted such other dreaded and contagious diseases as cholera, scarlet fever or measles were quarantined in the Pest House.

It was located within what is now the Old City Cemetery. The medical care and standards of cleanliness were practically non-existent, and most patients died and were usually buried in the adjacent public burial ground.

By 1862 Lynchburg had become a major Civil War hospital center, and the Pest House was used as the quarantine hospital for Confederate soldiers.

Dr. John Terrell, at age 33, discovered the horrible conditions in the Pest House and volunteered to assume responsibility for the soldiers.

He stayed on and cared for the most dreaded illnesses known to man until the end of the civil war. The care provided by Dr. Terrell and his reforms on cleanliness standards, reportedly reduced the Pest House mortality rate from 50 percent to 5 percent.

The structure we see is not the original Pest House, which was demolished in 1851. What we are looking at is Dr. Terrell’s office that he built at his farm in nearby Campbell County around 1840. It became his office for private practice after the war.

Throughout 1987 and 1988, the Southern Memorial Association had the structure moved from the old Terrell farm to its present location.

They painstakingly restored the building to “recreate and interpret medical science of the era”. The medical office and Pest House exhibits have been joined in this museum to give a more complete picture of nineteenth-century medicine, while still telling two very separate stories.

The Old City Cemetery Center

The Old City Cemetery Center, or visitors center as some may call it, where you are likely to be given a warm greeting by Dawn Fields, Public Relations and Visitor Services or Kathy Wise, Administrative Assistant.

The Center is the main office of the Old City Cemetery and houses the office of the Southern Memorial Association.

It is open every day of the week from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., March through October. However, during the winter months of November through February, the Center is closed on Sundays.

This is where we met up with Ted Delaney who is the Archivist & Curator of the Old City Cemetery.

We were fortunate to spend some time learning more about him and how he chose to make his career here after being a volunteer while in school. Ted also graciously permitted use of a couple of the photos noted on this site.

Kathy Wise is the Administrative Assistant at the Center and was extremely helpful in highlighting so many of the historical aspects of our Old City Cemetery.

If you have an opportunity to visit, be sure to say hello!

Since this is a cemetery, it seemed fitting that one area of the Old City Cemetery Center should be set up as a small museum depicting the mourning customs of 19th- and 20th-century America.

Permanent exhibits display mourning attire, hairwork jewelry, the evolution of coffins and embalming, and funeral and mourning etiquette. This museum is free of charge but interior tours of the other four is by appointment and a fee of $5/adult and $2/child is charged (and there is a $30 minimum).

Around the back of the Center is a pen with several goats who earn their keep by helping keep the cemetery’s hillsides free of overgrowth. The animals are always a great attraction for the kids. A major tragedy struck in late February 2007 when a pack of wild dogs got into the goat compound and killed three goats and two sheep. Replacements were forthcoming and the fence around the compound was strengthened and electrified.

Something Old, Something New
The Potter’s Fields

There have been no public burials in the old city cemetery since 1965 and only a very limited number of burials have been allowed by special permission "outside the walls" since that time.

The “inside the walls” and “outside the walls” are used to separate the very oldest part of the cemetery from the newest.

“Inside the walls” is the oldest part. The city of Lynchburg has always buried its indigent and very poor on its grounds, thus there are still burials being conducted in the new Potter’s Field section just to the east of the Glanders exhibit and across the road from the Chapel.

New Potter’s Field should be usable for another 25 years or so but eventually all the indigent burials will have to be scatterings.

The old city cemetery accommodates about six to eight indigent burials a year and they are given the same respect as a prominent person paying for a funeral would receive.

There have been about 75 internments in the new Potter’s Field since 1994. The chapel is used for indigent funerals and most often no one comes but there have been as many as 75 people arrive for an indigent.

There are several Potter’s Field spread around the cemetery and maybe a couple that no one knows about. Record keeping in the past left a lot to be desired.

In reality, it is unknown how many people rest in the Potter’s Fields; some are stacked on top of each other; and some are yet to be found. The Potter’s Field residents are a complete cross section of Lynchburg society; white, black, oldsters from nursing homes, abandoned babies and even John Doe murder victims.

It is interesting that various Lynchburg funeral parlors rotate in handling indigent burials; and with that we can transition from grave to funeral home.

The Undertaker Gets Respect

The Diuguid Funeral Service and Crematory is one of Lynchburg’s best known and certainly the oldest company of its kind in the area. That is probably the understatement of the year since Diuguid is the second-oldest funeral home in continuous operation in the United States.

From their website (www.diuguidfuneralservice.com) , we learn that “the firm began in 1817 by furniture maker Sampson Diuguid”.

Also we read that “during the Civil War, the firm was involved in the burial of no less than nine Confederate Generals, including Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early.

In 1872, the original building at 616 Main Street was replaced by a four-story brick structure that stood until its demolition 101 years later.” The Hearse House and Caretakers Museum at the Old City Cemetery contains the actual turn-of-the-century hearse owned by William Diuguid, son of George Diuguid, son of Samson Diuguid himself.

A Lynchburg-made Thornhill Wagon is also on display as well as many hand tools used to care for the Cemetery and an exhibit of Cemetery grave markers and gravestone carvers.

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Within This Enclosure

Without a doubt, the most beautiful and serene part of Old City Cemetery is the Scatter Garden, Lotus pond and Butterfly garden on the left just opposite the Station House Museum.

The cemetery has been closed to burials for well over 45 years however,in 1996, the City Council approved the re-opening of the Old City Cemetery on a limited basis for the scattering of ashes in a specially designated area known as the Scatter Garden.

It is sheltered in a natural dell, attractively planted with peonies and ground cover.

It is enclosed with an "old" oval-shaped wrought-iron fence and a marble marker placed to the right of the fence, inscribed with the words, "Ashes of the Dead Have Been Lovingly Placed Within This Enclosure."

Photo credit: Ted Delaney
Old City Cemetery
Archivist and Curator, by permission.

In order to arrange for scattering the ashes of a loved one, contact the Southern Memorial Association in the office at the Cemetery Center or call them at (434)847-1465.

The chapel or the Station House Museum across the road can be available to the family for use during the time of the scattering.

The nearby Lotus Pond and Butterfly Garden create an atmosphere of serenity and natural beauty.

Beloved family pets have not been overlooked by the Association either. A special area has been set aside for the scattering of ashes of cherished pets within a garden setting on a bluff overlooking the Cemetery’s pond, chapel, and dovecote.

Photo credit: Ted Delaney
Old City Cemetery
Archivist and Curator, by permission.

Waiting for a Train

The small Station House museum, on the right side of the road and across from the Scatter Garden, we find a railroad station of all things. It is a reconstruction of the old C&O railroad depot that served the city of Stapleton in Amherst County from 1897 to 1937.

Why would we want to put a railroad station in our Old City Cemetery, you ask? Good question.

Lynchburg has a rich railroad history which was one of the reasons that Yankee General David Hunter set out to capture Lynchburg and put an end to the rail traffic that was supplying the confederate forces. Additionally, many of the citizens who now reside in the cemetery, both black and white, had deep ties to the railroad.

The interior furnishing of the depot reflect the WWI era instead of the civil war years; after all, the station was built 32 years after the civil war.

Chapel and Columbarium

In 2005 and 2006 the chapel and columbarium were built by the Southern Memorial Association and presented to the city as a bicentennial gift.

The chapel in one sense is the cemetery’s newest museum, built to honor the numerous religious leaders buried here since 1806.

Many Lynchburg residents don’t even know that beneath the chapel is a lower-level Columbarium containing 288 niches for placement of urns and 12 crypts for entombment.

The terracotta medallion shown in the center of the far wall of the Columbarium was salvaged from the façade of a late 19th century municipal building in Kentucky.

Photo credit:
Ted Delaney
Archivist and Curator
Old City Cemetery Museums and Arboretum.
His photos were featured in the American Cemetery magazine of May 2008; “A Landmark Cemetery Enjoying a Renaissance”.

Horses in the Old City Cemetery?

Glanders Exhibit near the Old City Cemetery's exit is another site related to the work of Dr. Terrell of the Pest House fame. Lynchburg had the honor of being only one of four quartermaster depots during the civil war and had responsibility for a large number of horses. Many of the animals came down with Glanders, a bactorial respiratory infection that was usually fatal. It is highly contagious among horses, mules, and donkeys, mostly through direct contact such as nuzzling, sharing water troughs or even using infected harnesses with multiple horses. Dr. Terrell and an associate, Dr. Page conducted very important pathological veterinary work on the Glanders horses. The result of their examinations was published in 1864 and was called the first important American contribution to veterinary medicine.

The Earley Memorial Shrub Garden

As we prepare to leave the Old City Cemetery, we pass by a large gently sloping lawn where an imposing, stately pecan tree immediately grabs our attention.

We have just found the Earley Memorial Shrub Garden and it is well worth stopping for a while to experience its serenity. On either side of the mulched walkway are vistas of over 50 varieties of old fashioned flowering shrubs, small flowering trees, and antique daffodils punctuated from time to time by an unusual architectural relic from Lynchburg's history.

The shrubs and daffodils were chosen precisely to reflect the types of plants that were extremely popular in 19th century gardens.

The variety is remarkable in that many are still well known today; some had gone out of favor but now enjoying a revival of interest; others are native plants that went out of favor as new hybridized varieties became popular.

This Tour Is Coming To A Close

As you may be able to tell from the length of these pages, the Old City Cemetery is a place you can visit many times throughout the year and learn something new about the history and people who are keeping it so lovingly.

If you are fortunate enough to visit during the Christmas season, this is the view as you are leaving our Old City Cemetery...

Thanks to the Wreaths Across America, and all those who participated in the program.

Return to Top of Old City Cemetery

Navigate to Point of Honor and meet Lynchburg's founders
Navigate to Sandusky and meet Charles Johnstone
Navigate to Appomattox; where the surrender was signed
Navigate to Jefferson's Poplar Forest
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