WOODLAWN CEMETERY

FOUNDED: May 13,1895

ADDITONAL NAMES: N/A

AFFILIATION(S): N/A

HISTORY:

Woodlawn Cemetery is a historic cemetery in the Benning Ridge neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in the United States. The 22.5-acre (91,000 m2) cemetery contains approximately 36,000 burials, nearly all of them African Americans. The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 20, 1996.Woodlawn Cemetery was founded because of a crisis among the black burying grounds. Graceland Cemetery, founded in 1871 on the edge of the Federal City, was rapidly engulfed by residential development. By the early 1890s, the decomposition of bodies in the partially filled cemetery was polluting the nearby water supply and creating a health hazard. The Commissioners of the District of Columbia (the city's government) pressed for the closure of Graceland to accommodate the need for housing. With Graceland on the verge of closing, a number of white citizens decided that a new burial ground, much farther from any development, was needed. A portion of which was the site of the American Civil War's Fort Chaplin Burial plots were quickly laid out, and Woodlawn Cemetery opened on May 13, 1895. Between May 14, 1895, and October 7, 1898, nearly 6,000 sets of remains were transferred from Graceland Cemetery to several mass graves at Woodlawn Cemetery. Over the years, the closure of smaller churchyard cemeteries in the Federal City as well as some large burying grounds resulted in more mass graves. The last major transfer occurred from 1939 to 1940, when 139 full and partial sets of remains were relocated to Woodlawn. In all a dozen mass graves eventually came to exist at Woodlawn Cemetery. Woodlawn was an integrated cemetery, in that it accepted burials of both whites and blacks. Internally, however, it was segregated, with Caucasians being buried in a whites-only section.

As the cemetery filled and space for burial became available in desegregated cemeteries, income from the sale of burial plots dropped significantly. White burials at Woodlawn, once a significant source of income, plummeted after 1912. Lacking a perpetual care trust, the cemetery fell into disrepair. The last burial was made there about 1969,with the total number of dead at the cemetery about 36,000.

The Washington DC Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. has had a relationship with Woodlawn Cemetery since 2018, when we discovered that one of our Founders, Mary Edna Brown Coleman, was buried there. We had a vested interest in the preservation of the cemetery. In 2022, we discovered that there were two Founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Marjorie Hill and Sarah Merriwether Nutter, also buried at Woodlawn, so we invited Xi Omega Chapter of AKA to join us in collaboration, in assuring that the sacred grounds of Woodlawn Cemetery would always exist.

It is our desire to build community awareness of the many needs of the cemetery, while assisting the volunteers with tasks identified. Our organizations, therefore formed the Woodlawn Collaborative Project to make a difference in this sacred burial space of our ancestors.

BCN Contact Information:

Tamara Phelps

granddeltadime@gmail.com

https://woodlawndc.org/

MACEDONIA BAPTIST CHURCH CEMETERY

FOUNDED: 1968

ADDITONAL NAMES: James Thomas Howard

AFFILIATION(S): None

HISTORY:

First church erected by former enslaved families in Hillsdale/Barry Farm, a new African American settlement established by the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1867 to help relieve the housing problem encountered by black refugees who had arrived in Washington in droves during the Civil War. The idea for the settlement grew out of a meeting between General O.O. Howard, commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and a group of African American refugees living in a makeshift settlement on K Street between 14th and 17th Streets. Howard told the group that they could not stay on land that was not theirs. They responded “very pertinently,” according to Howard’s autobiography, “‘Where shall we go, and what shall we do?’” Howard replied with a question of his own: “What would make you self-supporting?” and heard an almost unanimous answer: “Land! Give us Land!”

The Freedmen’s Bureau responded by creating a settlement for newly arrived African Americans, offering to sell them lots and enough lumber to build a small house. In April 1867 the agency spent $52,000 to buy 375 acres of farmland from the Barry family (former slave owners) on the eastern bank of the Eastern Branch, as the Anacostia River was then known. The land was quickly surveyed into one-acre lots that “were taken with avidity,” Howard noted, because the prospect of owning land was an excellent stimulus for the newly freed African Americans. “Everyone who visited the Barry Farm and saw the new hopefulness with which most of the dwellers there were inspired,” Howard recalled, “could not fail to regard the entire enterprise as judicious and beneficent.”

Macedonia was quickly built on one of the first plots purchased.

BCN Contact Information:

Trish Savage

tsavage2737@comcast.net

MT. PLEASANT PLAINS CEMETERY

FOUNDED: 1870

ADDITONAL NAMES: None

AFFILIATION(S): None

HISTORY:

Mt. Pleasant Plains Cemetery in Washington, D.C., was a Reconstruction Era cemetery owned and operated by the Colored Union Benevolent Association from 1870 to 1890. More than 8,400 people were buried there. About 60 percent of the burials were those of young children under age 5. Among the adults, most came to the District from Virginia and Maryland during and immediately after the Civil War. The Association that owned the burial ground was founded by free Black men in 1838; it was multi-denominational. Mt. Pleasant Plains Cemetery at Walter Pierce Park is a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom site because of the Association's ties to the 1848 escape on the schooner Pearl, and because its burials include countless freedom seekers, known and unknown.

In 2005, descendants, allies, and Howard University anthropologists undertook a multi-year archaeological and historical investigation of the site, using non-invasive methods to document and protect the graves that remain. No grave markers are visible at the site. Today, portions of the seven-acre cemetery are occupied by a city park (Walter Pierce Park), the National Zoo, and Rock Creek Park (a national park).

BCN Contact Information:

Mary Belcher

maryjbelcher@comcast.net

walterpierceparkcemeteries.org