Once Upon a Time...A Cemetery Story

by Jane Baber White

Blackwell Press, hardcover, 240 pages, 487 color photographs; ISBN: 0977952355; $60

Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood

Once Upon a Time . . . A Cemetery Story is a celebration of one woman's odyssey, and that of the many friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens of Lynchburg and its Tinbridge Hill neighborhood, which joined her in the quest to reclaim Lynchburg's Old City Cemetery.

Jane Baber White's tale is not entirely new to members of the Southern Garden History Society. One chapter in the new book, entitled "The Roses," is adapted from her lead article in the Vol. XX, No. 1, Spring-Summer 2005 issue of Magnolia, "A Graveyard of Old Garden Roses—Lynchburg's Old City Cemetery." But Once Upon a Time is a splendid present that Jane White gave to herself, deservedly, and to those who answered her call, responding to the urgent need to save an important part of their city's history. In its pages we see how the goal was shared, a spirit of cooperation grew, and everyone's aim was accomplished. It is a remarkable tale, told here as much in hundreds of photographs as in the necessary accompanying text.

The story line in Once Upon a Time is particularly Southern. It was told earlier, in 1968, in Behind the Old Brick Wall, also subtitled "A Cemetery Story," compiled by Lucy Harrison Miller Baber with research and writing by Evelyn Lee Moore, and published by the Lynchburg Chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Mrs. Baber, who died in 1996, was the mother of Jane Baber White. A passion for history linked the generations of this family and that of many who took up the cause.

The one-acre tract at the heart of these grounds was established as a public cemetery in 1806 by the council of Lynchburg. It succeeded the old churchyard where interments had been made around the then disestablished Church of England. City Cemetery served as Lynchburg's principal cemetery until 1824 when the city's Presbyterian congregation acquired a two-acre parcel on which it opened a new cemetery. For some three decades thereafter, prominent citizens of Lynchburg favored either the Presbyterian cemetery or the City Cemetery which had been enlarged in 1816 by one acre, by another two acres in 1837, and one-half acre in 1856.

In 1861 City Cemetery was given a greater, altogether larger responsibility. A special section of the cemetery was set apart for this new purpose. The buildings of Lynchburg soon came to house thousands of the Confederate sick and wounded in improvised hospitals. Over the space of four years, workers brought the bodies of some 2,201 deceased Confederate soldiers here, to a final resting place in the city. The soldiers were the lower rank enlisted men. At least 187 Union casualties were also interred in the cemetery during the war, but in 1866, their bodies were removed to a Federal cemetery near Norfolk.

That same year the ladies of Lynchburg, like those in many towns and cities of the South, formed a memorial association to tend to the graves of the fallen. They and their descendants have honored that heavy responsibility to the present, with only a change in their association's name.

But this Confederate legacy is only part of the extraordinary story of the Old City Cemetery. The complement is that of those who came to be buried here in the years from the 1850s until 1965 when the grounds were closed except to the city's poorest. In 1855, in a time of antebellum prosperity, leading citizens of the city organized a new cemetery company, acquired property, and engaged John Notman (1810-1865), the Scottish-born Philadelphia landscape gardener who had designed Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery, to design its grounds. In the years thereafter most of the leading citizens of Lynchburg elected to inter their kinsmen, often in family plots, in the fashionable park-like setting of Spring Hill, while others honored loyalties to the Presbyterian burying ground. In a display of class distinction, deceased Confederate officers were interred at Spring Hill or the Presbyterian grounds. The available areas of City Cemetery, effectively surrounding the Confederate Section, became the burying ground of low-income white citizens and Lynchburg's black citizens, a sizable population of freedmen and former slaves. "There are about 20,000 citizens buried in the Cemetery and of those, seventy-five percent are African-American; one-third are children under the age of four years, and only about one in seven (outside the Confederate Section) have gravemarkers."

The circumstances by which those who tended the graves of Confederate Soldiers and those who attended to the larger grounds occupied mainly by the black citizens of Lynchburg rose to a common purpose is conveyed in the words and images of Once Upon a Time. Its genesis was a luncheon party in 1981. Elizabeth Otey Watson and Lucy Kirkwood Scott Hotchkiss, the last remaining dowagers of the Lynchburg Confederate Memorial Association, were hosts to four young Lynchburg friends, Frances Gunn Kemper, Jessica Bemis Ward, Jane Baber White, and Mina Walker Wood. The torch was passed to these new hands along with a checkbook holding a balance of some $300.The old organization passed into history and a new one, the Southern Memorial Association, was born. The survival of six aged rose brushes at City Cemetery and the interest of rosarian Carl Cato (died 1996) gave rise to the first garden project in 1985. A 500-foot brick wall enclosing one side of the Confederate Section became the backdrop to a planting of fifty-seven historic roses selected by Mr. Cato. Today the rose collection in the cemetery numbers above 270 bushes, including a replanting of the red and white roses, "Silver Moon" and "Paul's Scarlet Climber," first planted in the 1930s. It has attracted rosarians from throughout the nation to the cemetery and a Rose Festival is held annually.

The cemetery grounds beyond the Confederate Section were overgrown, neglected, and in dire need of attention in the 1980s and up to June 1993 when a huge storm swept through Lynchburg. In the Confederate Section many of the aged sugar maples and the Speaker's Belvidere were left on the ground, broken, while hundreds of trees in other parts of the cemetery had also fallen. This storm, Jane White writes, "provided the impetus for rehabilitation of the entire Cemetery." The bonds formed between the ladies of the Southern Memorial Association, the black citizens of Lynchburg, many of whom were descendants of those buried there or residents of the surrounding Tinbridge Hill neighborhood, and others grew during the long months of clean-up. They became the firm foundation on which the continuing series of landscape initiatives and related projects described by Jane Baber White have succeeded.

The Speaker's Belvidere was restored, the arched stone gate opening into the Confederate Section was re-mortared, a brick vault was rebuilt, and many broken and flattened gravestones were repaired. The oldest potter's fields were reclaimed from neglect and a new potter's field was designated in 1994. A damp low-lying area of the grounds became the location of an elegant stone-bordered pond in 1994, and a scatter garden was created in 1996 to accommodate contemporary funeral practice. A memorial shrubbery was planted and then under planted, also as a memorial, with historic daffodil varieties. Favored flowering plants that have long graced Southern cemeteries, including Yucca filamentosa with its cream-colored spires, were replanted to ornament the grounds. Historic apple varieties, known to have been grown in Virginia, were planted in the Duval Holt Orchard. Trees were planted to replace those destroyed or damaged.

Bricks-and-mortar construction has also figured in the repair and enhancement of the cemetery. Portions of the cemetery's old brick walls have been rebuilt and a gate house erected. A cemetery center was completed in 1997 and expanded in 2004, a Hearse House and Caretaker's Museum opened in 1999, and a white frame chapel and columbarium completed in 2006. Property owners in Tinbridge Hill found a renewed pride in their neighborhood of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century houses and began renovations, restorations, and repairs to the houses lining the streets around the cemetery, one of which became the Legacy Museum of African American History.

The Southern Memorial Association also adopted a publishing program. Behind the Old Brick Wall, first published in 1968 and long out-of-print, was reissued in 1998. Free Blacks of Lynchburg, Virginia, 1805-1865, was published in 2001. A cookbook, Food to Die For, appeared in 2004, became a popular seller, and continues in print, generating profits for the association.

Early in Once Upon a Time, Jane Baber White identifies herself as a landscape designer who had rescued other historic gardens in Lynchburg. "But somewhere in the midst of the gardening I became a historian . . . ." Her talents in both professions are readily apparent in the landscape of Old City Cemetery and the pages of Once Upon a Time . . . A Cemetery Story.