Evergreen Cemetery

Mar 15

Site Brief:

Founded: 1891

Location: Richmond, Virginia

Additional name(s): N/A

Affiliate group(s): N/A

History:

Founded in 1891 by a private African American association, Evergreen Cemetery is the final resting place of an estimated 50,000 people—complete records are not available for the site—among them some of Richmond’s most prominent residents. Maggie L. Walker, a pioneering banker, philanthropist, and entrepreneur, was buried there in 1934. Yards from her lies John Mitchell Jr., outspoken editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper and member of the city’s Common Council from 1888 to 1898. Other luminaries interred at Evergreen include Dr. Sarah Garland Jones, the first African American and first woman licensed to practice medicine in Virginia, and the Reverend J. Andrew Bowler, who helped organize the first school for Black students in Richmond’s Church Hill neighborhood and then served on its faculty for more than fifty years

For a time in the early 20th century, Evergreen was a preeminent burial site for Black Richmond. But the community it served was increasingly burdened by Virginia’s system of legal discrimination. The weight of Jim Crow placed inordinate pressures on families and organizations, drastically limited economic opportunity, and posed a daily threat to Black people’s health, safety, and dignity. Many African Americans left the area. Others could not afford to continue maintaining family plots, though many families tried.

The 59-acre cemetery began to decline in the mid-20th century, even as the all-white Virginia General Assembly funded upkeep at many Confederate cemeteries. Successive owners have tried and failed to maintain the cemetery, including a series of initiatives led by funeral directors in the 1970s. Newspaper articles from the 1960s and 1970s report on the rampant overgrowth at Evergreen, as well as chronic vandalism. Over the years, volunteer efforts have made some progress at clearing the cemetery, particularly its center section, but have not been able to hold back nature. The cemetery’s last owner, the Enrichmond Foundation, collapsed in 2022. The fate of Evergreen remains unclear as of this writing in February 2023.