
The gravesite of Nannie Euphemia Caskie in Shockoe Hill Cemetery (Photo by Alyson L. Taylor-White)
Shockoe Hill Cemetery’s most prominent angel rises in triumph from the marker of Nannie Euphemia Caskie. She died at age 61 in Florence, Italy, and received internment on June 23, 1893. Etched on the stone beneath the winged being is the word “MIZPEH.” The Hebrew word, also spelled “mizpah,” describes the view from a high place, or a memorial shrine. Both definitions suit the cemetery, situated on a bluff at Fifth and Hospital streets.
Shockoe Hill is one of the city’s most historic and least known burial grounds, which for many years suffered from waning public attention and the vagaries of city budgets. Preservation organizations and, most important, after 2006, the Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery, drew attention for the cemetery’s protection and restoration. And now a long-needed book is in the world, by Richmond editor and writer Alyson L. Taylor-White, “Shockoe Hill Cemetery: A Richmond Landmark History."
She’ll speak about her three years of research and a few of the many stories of Shockoe Hill, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 11, at the Bon Air Historical Society meeting at Bon Air Christian Church, 2017 Buford Road.
After Taylor-White’s book signing, you can go up to the cemetery for the 3 p.m. Peter Francisco Day and a Revolutionary War Tour. Francisco came to these shores as a foundling on the docks of City Point (Hopewell) and grew up (and up, to 7 feet tall) to fight in six Revolutionary War engagements and survive the winter of Valley Forge. He became a living legend as "The American Hercules."
Francisco’s tale is but one of what may be anywhere between 8,000 to 30,000 stories that slumber beneath the 12.7 acres of Shockoe Hill. Taylor-White settles on “about 27,000.”
The lack of accuracy is not unusual. She explains, “You have many unmarked graves, and, difficult as it may seem to believe, not all the cemetery records are consistent with each other. It happens with every cemetery.” The number may also reflect children. “Infant mortality was appalling in the days that Shockoe was at its most active,” she says. In various sections Taylor-White recounts odd-named causes of death, and what we’d call some of them today, and also explains the iconography not only of the memorials but even the plantings.
Richmond surveyor Richard Young’s 1822 design stipulates down to the last yew tree – long a symbol of death and legend. Young created a grid pattern for Shockoe that reflected the city beyond its brick walls.
“You go from being neighbors in the metropolis to neighbors in the necropolis,” Taylor-White says. "It was also the city's first purpose-built place. Almost a park."
Taylor-White, for 25 years editor of the Virginia Review magazine, possesses an abiding interest in matters historical and cultural. She’s volunteered at several of the city’s museums, including the John Marshall House. “The Chief Justice is Shockoe’s biggest celebrity,” she says.
Marshall, an inveterate walker, visited the wife gravesite of his wife, “his beloved Polly,” as Taylor-White describes, Mary Willis Ambler, who predeceased him by almost four years. Marshall, at age 79 and the longest-serving U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, hiked on a humid summer morning from his house to the cemetery, but during the personal pilgrimage he collapsed. His final illness began and he died in Philadelphia on July 6, 1835. Shockoe then received the superstar that attracted others to seek their final resting place there. He is with Polly but also among many of those with whom he worked and socialized.
Conspicuous in his absence is Edgar Allan Poe, because practically everybody he knew growing up in Richmond is here: his non-adoptive un-parents, John and wife Frances Keeling Valentine Allan; first older-woman crush Jane Craig Stith Stanard; Eliza White, an early teen infatuation and poet, and daughter of Thomas White, his Southern Literary Messenger editor (he’s at St. John’s); and the one who got away: his could’ve-been wife, Elmira Royster Shelton. People visit her grave and leave stones and tokens, “People from Spain, from Italy,” says Taylor-White. “Poe really should be at Shockoe. Happenstance took him in Baltimore. He spent half his life in Richmond and considered himself a Virginian.”
The dead got around in Richmond. Taylor-White’s examination of exhumations reveal bodies from Shockoe moved to Hollywood because of the star appeal. Union dead brought to Shockoe were later moved to the Richmond National Cemetery on Williamsburg Road. “Back then, they didn’t appear to have many reservations about plucking people up and putting them somewhere else,” Taylor-White says. Which sometimes causes confusion for descendants combing the rows of Shockoe for a relative.
Shockoe Hill is Richmond’s first municipal cemetery after the hill of St. John's Episcopal Church couldn’t receive any more of the departed. The city owned the Broad Street-facing end of the burial ground. But Richmond’s growth of the living also brought more dead and necessitated an isolated place in which to bury them.
They came to Shockoe not just for social standing, but due to murder — including those who came out on the wrong side of duels — suicide, disasters (the 1863 Confederate Laboratory explosion that killed many young women and the 1870 collapse of the Virginia Capitol), accidents (“You’d be surprised how many seem to have died by trains,” Taylor-White says), epidemics (cholera, yellow fever, influenza) and war. There are some 400 veterans of the War of 1812, more than any other burying ground in the state, and Taylor-White says, “possibly more than anywhere else.”
There are the infamous: slave trader Robert Lumpkin, though his gravesite is unmarked in part because of clerical errors in the spelling of his name, and the heroic and quirky Elizabeth Van Lew, a Richmonder and pro-Union abolitionist.
Van Lew’s grave went unmarked, too, until the oversight came to be recognized by a sympathetic group of Bostonians connected to a Union officer whom Van Lew helped escape from Libby Prison, Col. Paul Joseph Revere, grandson of the silversmith patriot. Revere didn’t survive the war, but his family remembered Van Lew. “They placed this big hunk of Massachusetts puddingstone on her grave so that you can’t miss it,” Taylor-White says.
Shockoe also reflects the racial divide of the living city beneath the hillside. Just two African-Americans are interred there, both former longtime female servants. John Mitchell Jr., the fighting editor and publisher of the weekly Richmond Planet, in the Jan. 4, 1896, issue, wrote about the problematic burial of one of them, Lucy Armstead, who gave her last age as 116 years. She served the family of Rev. George Woodbridge, once the rector of Monumental Church. Mary Woodbridge, who was nursed by Armstead, insisted on her burial there alongside her father. The white sexton at first balked at lowering the coffin, and the gravediggers wouldn’t shovel in dirt.
It’s a compelling perspective on Richmond’s past, but Taylor-White points out a historical problem: “Rev. Woodbridge isn’t buried at Shockoe,” she explains. “He’s in Hollywood. Maybe this was a Woodbridge family plot. Why Mitchell said this, I don’t know, unless it was just told to him.”
The Lucy Armstead story underscores why Taylor-White took on the subject. “You can find out a lot about life in a place like Shockoe Cemetery,” she says. “You see through the research the otherwise invisible connections between friends and neighbors — and people who weren’t friends — notorious people and kind people.”
And even unexpected relatives. During her research, Taylor-White found what turns out to have been a family member by cousinage buried at Shockoe, and she recently met one of that person's descendants.