Richmond Cemetery CO

Emily Stock, Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation’s (DRPT) manager of rail planning, organized the group to talk about a high-speed rail project called “DC2RVA” that it wants to construct here.“The DC2RVA project started in 2014,” says Stock to the group. “And we met many of you all through the process.”Most of the academics, archaeologists, preservationists, museum directors, advocates and others in the group are here because for more than a year family historian Lenora McQueen has meticulously researched this place, emailing the group regular updates as she has helped uncover its hidden past.In 2017, McQueen came to Charlottesville from her home in Texas to speak at a slavery symposium at the University of Virginia. While in Virginia, she took a trip to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, where she learned that her fourth great grandmother was buried in the city around 1857. But she did not recognize the graveyard, so she looked at a map, punched the location into her GPS and set out to find it.(Courtesy of Lenora McQueen)“I didn’t recognize it as a cemetery when I got there, I found it rather confusing,” said McQueen. She recalls seeing a desolate hillside, with Interstate 64 running over it and an abandoned gas station at the top. She wondered if her GPS was broken.“I drove down Fifth Street and across the bridge,” she says. “I turned around, I turned left and went down the hill into that gully and crossed the railroad tracks and turned around. And thought, I hope this is not it, you know, please don't be it, but that was it. That was exactly it.”From 1816 to 1879 this was Richmond’s main African American graveyard, where, according to McQueen’s research, more than 20,000 people were buried, including at least five of her ancestors.But burial records are thin, and gravestones have long since disappeared. In fact, over the last 150 years, the entire graveyard’s been destroyed. First, an 1883 article described workers using bones as infill while co...