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William Custalo, buried at East End Cemetery, was a prominent Richmond restaurateur. (Photo by Brian Palmer)
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Brian Palmer and Erin Hollaway Palmer clearing debris at East End Cemetery (Photo by Brian Palmer)
John Shuck, with his red pickup truck full of weed whackers and bug spray, has been a regular presence for nine years at East End Cemetery and neighboring Evergreen Cemetery, leading volunteers in clearing brush, cutting trees and recovering buried gravestones.
“Look over here,” the retired SunTrust IT technician says during a recent Saturday dig, pointing to a dense blanket of kudzu. “There’s graves all through there.” It has been a daunting task to clear these sites on the city’s eastern edge, but help may be on the way.
The Virginia Outdoors Foundation (VOF) provided $400,000 for the Enrichmond Foundation to buy the cemeteries through a conservation easement. Enrichmond, which supports the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities, plans a major restoration. Additionally, the Virginia General Assembly, thanks to legislation sponsored by Del. Delores McQuinn, has reversed years of inequity by granting historic African-American cemeteries such as Evergreen and East End the same upkeep funding — roughly $35,000 per year — that the graves of Confederate soldiers have received for decades.
"This is a cemetery started in 1897 because of segregation. Segregation followed these folks to the death," says Brian Palmer of the Friends of East End volunteer group, which has been painstakingly finding and documenting lost graves.
A few miles away from the beautifully maintained Confederate graves at Oakwood Cemetery, these burial sites, and two accompanying paupers’ graveyards, have endured decades of neglect, abuse and legal limbo. Shuck estimates that as many as 17,000 could be buried in the sites.
Thanks to meticulous care, in certain sections, East End, like Evergreen, can look like a maintained graveyard. Pointing to a clear piece of field with graves jutting out of the soil, Shuck says, "You couldn't see that six months ago."
"There's a stream on the property, and trails," says Jason McGarvey of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, which receives money from the General Assembly to further state land conservation. "Maybe there's an opportunity to take something that's been neglected, a black eye, and turn it into a real community asset that would restore dignity to the ten of thousands buried there."
But before plans move forward, longtime volunteers are seeking assurance that they won’t be pushed aside.
“We have done all of the work over the past four years,” Palmer says. “We believe our unrestricted access should continue and that we should have a role in the decision making and planning for the cemetery going forward, whoever the owner is.”
"Enrichmond could be a good partner out there, but they need to look at the resources," says Marvin Harris of the Evergreen Restoration Society, which has a crew that battles nature every Thursday. "We are the boots on the ground. We know what's needed and we've got a pretty good network of people who are going to come out and maintain." Harris wants to make sure, as Enrichmond's plan goes forward, that local minority-owned businesses are used for the heavy work. "Being an African-American cemetery, it just makes sense that we'd give the minority businesses a hand up."
At a June meeting sponsored by Friends of East End, Enrichmond and VOF officials insisted that everyone’s input will be considered when the chosen consultant, the Chicora Foundation, comes on board this month to create a restoration master plan.
“Right now it comes down to trust. We have to trust each other,” says Brett Glymph, the VOF president. “The stars might not align like this again, and we can’t miss this opportunity.”
Enrichmond’s president, John Sydnor, acknowledges that the restoration wouldn’t be happening without the volunteers’ tireless efforts — it was news coverage of their crusade that spurred all this. But he says a fundraising campaign will have to raise millions, and the conservation agreement’s terms preclude convening a governing board of volunteers and descendants.
Still, Sydnor says, “I cannot see going forward without the old volunteers as well as new volunteers.”
A few days after the community meeting, on a hot 90-degree Saturday, it's business as usual at the graveyard. Shuck is deep inside East End with longtime helpers Mark Schneider and Bruce Tarr, whacking away brush. A few yards away, Palmer helps his wife, Erin, remove the dirt from a grave she's just uncovered, while Harris is at the Evergreen entrance talking to potential new helpers.
"Our job is to take care of the task and get it done," Harris says, surveying a dense thicket that will need to be cleared. "We are going to have to work together to keep this thing going. We can't work against each other."
History Makers
The 60-acre Evergreen Cemetery can lay claim to some of Richmond’s most illustrious, as well as lesser-known figures such as Sarah Garland Boyd Jones, Virginia’s first African-American woman doctor.
Thanks to the Evergreen Restoration Society, visitors are now able to reach the grave of Maggie L. Walker, a community leader and the first woman bank founder and president in the United States.
John Mitchell Jr., a newspaper publisher, city alderman, banker and advocate for African-American equality, is also buried in a once-overgrown plot.
Volunteers have cleared the brush around the grave of the Rev. J. Andrew Bowler, a Baptist minister and schoolteacher who helped organize the first school for blacks in Church Hill.
During a community meeting about Evergreen and East End cemeteries in June, volunteer Jarene Fleming told the crowd, “I know that my great-grandmother Caroline Brown Coles and her husband, Marshall Coles, are out there, and we aren’t going to stop bushwhacking until we find them.”
