Editor's note: This article has been changed since it originally appeared in print.
Erin Hollaway Palmer and Brian Palmer have been instrumental in the Friends of East End’s efforts to identify, restore and map graves at East End and Evergreen cemeteries.
Jim Shadoian is covered in dirt, twigs and leaves as he surveys the hilltop loop at Evergreen Cemetery. He has cut the 11-acre area back at least six times in his 10 months as caretaker of Evergreen and the neighboring East End Cemetery. Home to the graves of Maggie L. Walker, John Mitchell and other luminaries, the loop is also just a fraction of nearly 77 acres of overgrown burial sites within the two historic African American cemeteries. Working mostly alone and with occasional help from volunteers, Shadoian admits he hasn’t spent much time outside of the upper loop. “It gets me,” he says, “makes me wonder whether I’ve done anything, because there’s just so much to do.”
The feeling is shared by many who have labored to clean up the cemeteries. Much of the work that had been ongoing to reclaim the sites from decades of neglect, vandalism and environmental degradation has slowed due to conflicts between the Enrichmond Foundation, which now owns the cemeteries, and Friends of East End, a volunteer group whose work at the cemeteries predates Enrichmond’s ownership.
Enrichmond began as the Richmond Recreation and Parks Foundation in 1990, an umbrella organization formed to manage conservation easements and assist volunteer organizations working in green spaces throughout the city, including the James River Park System. In 2010, it was renamed Enrichmond, and its mission grew. The organization expanded its work into Henrico County in 2017.
While the Friends of East End have been active at the cemeteries since 2013, Enrichmond’s involvement began after it acquired Evergreen in 2017 and East End in 2019. Following its ill-fated stewardship of the 17th Street Market (Enrichmond originally managed the redeveloped market, but the city took over the space in 2019), the organization sought to “become more proactive in the preservation, protection and increase of public space in the city of Richmond” as part of its larger mission to “build equity in and protect public green spaces in the Richmond region,” says John Sydnor, executive director since 2011.
Friends of East End grew out of work started by John Shuck and Veronica Davis in 2008. A transplant from Iowa with a passion for genealogy, Shuck found a new sense of purpose when he saw the condition of the cemeteries and met Davis, who had published “Here I Lay My Burdens Down: A History of the Black Cemeteries of Richmond, Virginia” in 2000.
In 2014 Brian Palmer moved to Richmond with his wife, Erin Hollaway Palmer, to join the University of Richmond faculty. An established photojournalist with extensive national and international experience, Palmer and his wife began volunteering with the Friends. In 2019, he discovered that he has at least one ancestor buried at East End.
Over the subsequent six years, the Friends marshaled more than 10,000 volunteers to clear undergrowth, locate headstones and begin to identify the estimated 15,000 or so interments at the site. They also shared resources with other groups doing similar work at Evergreen Cemetery, forming the East End Cemetery Collaboratory with faculty from the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University. The Collaboratory worked with UR’s Digital Scholarship Lab to map graves as they were located and identified, with more than 3,300 graves now mapped. The Friends of East End was established as a 501(c)(3) in 2017.
According to Palmer, the Friends of East End and other parties that had been previously referred to as “stakeholders and partners” have been denied a say in how East End Cemetery is managed, despite the group’s investment of time and resources and prior promises of unrestricted access.
In May, Palmer says, Enrichmond also presented the group with binding volunteer agreements that he felt were at odds with the work they had been doing. In particular, the initial draft agreement put Enrichmond in proprietary ownership of all work done at the site, including intellectual property such as photographs Palmer had already taken. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like that,” he says.
“I personally asked [the Palmers] to work with us,” Sydnor says, “because we are the owners [of East End Cemetery], not the Friends. We offered the hand of partnership, and they said no.” Sydnor also shared later drafts of the volunteer agreement, which he claims addressed the concerns by removing the intellectual property restrictions, though Palmer says the revisions still left untenable provisions in place, such as restricting the group’s remediation and mapping efforts.
According to Palmer, however, the offer from Sydnor never came.
Enrichmond has begun its own effort at mapping interments. When asked why Enrichmond was proceeding with its own effort rather than working with the Collaboratory and Digital Scholarship Lab, Sydnor once again pointed to the question of ownership of the cemeteries themselves. “They gave us a link,” he says, “but they didn’t give us the whole thing.”
Virginia Commonwealth University historian Ryan Smith finds the distinction amusing. “What are they going to do — independently host and support a robust mapping site?” he asks of Enrichmond. Smith has worked extensively with the Friends, VCU and UR to bring students out to the cemeteries while also finishing work on his forthcoming book, “Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond’s Historic Cemeteries.”
“The property owner’s responsibility when they take on a public resource like this is to engage with the volunteers who have been doing responsible work for a long time, to bring them into their efforts and not work against those efforts,” Smith says.
The lack of engagement has been to the detriment of the cemeteries, which continue to degrade and become overgrown without Friends of East End’s extensive network of volunteers, including descendants of people buried there and university students. Palmer remains frustrated. “Have you seen the state of things over there now?” he asks. “A year ago, we were making real progress, and now it looks like a jungle again.”
