Beulah Cemetery
GPS Coordinates: 38.7698444, -77.1533158
Closest Address: 6811 Beulah Street, Alexandria, VA 22310

The Beulah Cemetery is located on Beulah Street in Alexandria, Virginia, just 100 yards north of the Calvary Road Baptist Church, which is at 6811 Beulah Street, Alexandria VA 22310. The Cemetery is adjacent to the Schurtz Cemetery -- they are separated by only a small path. From a distance these two cemeteries seem to be two sections of the same cemetery.
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Here follows an excerpt from the Fairfax Genealogical Society website:
BEULAH CEMETERY
Adjacent to Calvary Road Baptist Church, 6811 Beulah Street (Route 613)
South Alexandria, Virginia USA
Original Information from Volume 5 of the Gravestone Books
Beulah Cemetery is located adjacent to Calvary Road Baptist Church, 6811 Beulah Street (Route 613) in the Franconia area. The cornerstone of the large brick edifice reads, “Calvary Road Baptist Church, 1986 - Beulah Baptist Church, 1967.” A large, arched sign over the main gate into the cemetery reads, “Beulah Cemetery.” Many of the burials predate 1967.
The pleasant, L-shaped cemetery is in good condition and well maintained. The grounds are bordered by an attractive iron fence at the front of the cemetery, along Beulah Street. A chain link fence encloses the cemetery on the sides and along the back. Several old trees stand on the perimeter of the graveyard.
The cemetery was surveyed in 1973, 1989, 1997 and 1998. Surveyors noted evidence of many unmarked graves.
The survey begins just inside the gate from Beulah Street with the row nearest the street. A path runs through this part of the cemetery from the gate to the back of the cemetery. Surveyors read the gravestones on the south side of the path, row by row, making a U-turn at the end of each row and then walking back to the path. They recorded the gravestones to the north of the path second, and then finished with the gravestones in the section nearest the church.
No Updates from Volume 6 of the Gravestone Books
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Here follows an excerpt from Donald Hakenson's "This Forgotten Land" tour guide:
Buried at Beulah Cemetery are three Confederate veterans that are listed below:
Sergeant James A. Bowling -- served in Braxton's Battery. Sergeant Bowling was a Deacon of the Beulah Baptist Church and died February 9, 1915, at his home near Franconia. He was 75 years old. Private George Triplett, a member of Mosby's command was a pallbearer at Sergeant Bowling's funeral.
Private Joseph Lyles -- served in Company F, Sixth Virginia Cavalry and was born in 1832. He enlisted on April 22, 1861 at Alexandria, Virginia and died in 1912.
Private William Michael Thorpe -- served in the Percell Artillery and was born in 1843. He enlisted on May 26, 1861 in King George County and served with the battery until the end of the war. He died in 1915.
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Here follows an excerpt from the Fall 2020 edition of the "Franconia Legacies" newsletter published by the Franconia Museum:
DREDGING UP THE PAST FROM BEULAH CEMETERY
(Excerpts from John Kelly’s Washington column of the June 9, 2020 Washington Post, as told or written by Jason Lefkowitz regarding a visit to Beulah Cemetery.)
Jason Lefkowitz met Bryant Lyles about five years ago. Lefkowitz was on his bicycle. Lyles was in his grave. “It was just sheer chance,” Lefkowitz said.
Lefkowitz used to live in Alexandria and would often go on bike rides. One afternoon, he stopped for a water break at Beulah Cemetery in Franconia. There, he saw the stone that marks the final resting place of Bryant Amos Lyles, 19 year old son of William and Julia Lyles. The marker is engraved with the scantest details of Bryant’s life: “Born May 8, 1898. Killed on Smoot’s Dredging Machine Sept. 1, 1917.”
“It seemed very obvious that there was a story there,” Lefkowitz said. “You don’t see a lot of headstones that have something that specific, calling out someone by name.” Who was Smoot? What was his dredging machine? And how did Bryant Lyles come to lose his life on it? The death obviously stuck in the craw of whoever paid for the headstone. Markers usually bear such positive euphemisms as “Taken too soon” or “Called to heaven.” Not this one: Killed. “Somebody wanted to send a message with this headstone,” said Lefkowitz, a 44-year-old software developer. “I wonder what that message was.”
The first thing Lefkowitz did was check old copies of The Washington Post. He found a brief item in the “Police News Notes” section of the Sept. 2, 1917, edition: “Bryant Lyles, 19, of Alexandria, Va., was drowned yesterday when he slipped from a dredge on which he was working about a half a mile above the Highway bridge. Corbin T. Jackson, also of Alexandria, who was working with Lyles, tried to save him, but in vain. The body was recovered.”
Smoot Sand & Gravel was founded in 1900 by Lewis E. Smoot, son of an Alexandria coal and lumber merchant. Sand and gravel made Smoot quite wealthy. His firm was paid to dredge sand and dirt from the river bottom to accommodate shipping traffic. Smoot owned land along the river, too, from which he could scoop up sand and gravel, both important building materials that were much in demand as Washington grew.
Lyles did not come from privilege. Lefkowitz studied census and other records and found that his family was a poor one and that young Bryant seems to have been raised by his grandparents. Lefkowitz said he was struck by the contrast between the lives of the two men: one obscure, one born into money.
“In the few interviews I was able to find with Smoot, he was very clear that he had earned his fortune as the result of hard work,” Lefkowitz said. “I’m sure he did work hard. . . . .” Sadly, in those pre-OSHA days, workplace fatalities were not uncommon. In 1914, James Dent fell from a Smoot dredge and drowned. C.W. Lawrence died after falling from one in 1929. In 1942, 18-year-old Garland Leo Lail fell off a Smoot dredge and drowned. His father worked as a cook on the vessel.
As for Bryant Lyles, the Washington Times reported he was working barefoot on top of the pilot house, which was slippery from the early-morning rain. But why barefoot? Why the pilot house? “At a certain point, it was obvious I was never going to get 100 percent of this story,” Lefkowitz said.
Earlier this year, Lefkowitz moved to South Carolina for a new job. Then the novel corona-virus came. “When we started in the pandemic, I was looking at this big pile of notes I accumulated,” he said. “I thought, if I’m ever going to write this, now seems like the time. I’m just going to write what I have.”
So Lefkowitz wrote up 4,000 words detailing his search, and on May 1, he posted them on Medium under the title “Two Lives, One Death and a Mystery.” He’s hoping to shake loose more information. Maybe someone from Lyles’s family heard a story about the drowning. Maybe the business records of the Smoot company are sitting in some warehouse. (The sand and gravel concern was sold in 1961 to the Pittsburgh based Dravo Corp., which was in turn bought by a Belgian mining company in 1998.) “My goal is not to make L.E. Smoot a villain,” Lefkowitz said. “I don’t have an ax to grind in this. I just feel like this is a story that could be told and should be told.”
(Franconia Museum note: Thanks to the Museum’s senior advisor, Margaret Welch, for bringing this captivating story to our attention. If you recall ever hearing any stories about Bryant Lyles, his background, family, etc., or stories with regard to this incident and would like to share them, please contact the Museum. Also, if you would like to share your own family stories or history, we would love to hear from you!!!)
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Here follows an excerpt from the Fall 2013 edition of the "Franconia Legacies" newsletter published by the Franconia Museum:
Howard and Ethel Gorham, Beulah Road Residents
Written By Ethel Virginia Adams Gorham
I was born on St. Asaph Street, in Alexandria, Virginia, on April 6, 1929. My mother, Mildred Pettit Adams, was born in Accotink, Virginia, in 1906, and my father, Mark Adams, was born in Arlington, Virginia, in 1903. I was one of nine children, and there are only two of us left now. We were all christened Episcopalian at the historic Christ Church on North Washington Street in Alexandria. We attended regularly, and my sisters and I sang in the choir.
I attended school in Alexandria, and graduated from George Washington High School. When I was 14 years old, I met Howard Gorham. He was visiting his brother, George, who lived next door to my family. Howard had just gone into the Army, because of World War II. I used to play with his brother’s children. I was just a kid myself, and he was, too.
Howard's father, Daniel “Lee” Gorham, and was born in Accotink, Virginia, around 1883, and his mother, Annie E. Taylor Gorham, born in Springfield, Virginia on April 10, 1889. Howard was one of 15 children. Lee Gorham worked for Fruit Growers Express in Alexandria, up on Telegraph Road. This company leased refrigerated railroad cars for transporting produce long distances around the country. The area is now townhouses, hotels and other businesses, but it was the railroad there in those days. A lot of the older men from Franconia worked for Fruit Growers Express. Clarence Gorham, Howard’s brother, also worked there. Lee and Clarence used to ride to work with some of the other Franconia men that worked for Fruit Growers Express. They worked for Fruit Growers until they retired and died.
When I was 16, and right out of high school, I took the Civil Service test. World War II was going on, and I went to work in the Pentagon. Construction of the Pentagon was finished in April 1945, and I started working there in July 1945. When I first went to work there, I worked for the Adjutant General's Office. We used to correspond with Fort Belvoir. At first I was a file clerk, and then I was in a secret area where we were making files and encoding data on the papers about the boys that were killed overseas. The papers would come in and we would have to fill those encoded papers out, but we weren't allowed to tell anyone. When I first went to work there they had these interpretive machines where all these cards had to be run through these machines. I had never seen one of those machines in my life before I went to work there.
I worked at the Pentagon for a little over a year, and I really loved it. Then when the war ended, I was laid off during a Reduction in Force. By that time I had gotten married, and was going to have a baby. Also, I didn’t have any means of transportation, so I never tried to go back. I still have my badge that I wore to get through the gate at the Pentagon, and it’s got my name and picture on it. I was supposed to turn it in, but I liked the picture and wanted to keep it. I have given it to the Franconia Museum to display, since it is an artifact.
Soon after I met Howard, he went off to war for two years. I was 16 years old when he came back home. When I was 17 years old, we got married on June 17, 1946. When we were first married, we lived in an apartment in Alexandria for 3-4 months. In November 1946, we moved to Franconia to a one-room house on Beulah Road.
A lot of the young people had gotten married around the same time, right after the war when the boys had come back home. Then they all started building their houses around the same time, and raising their families.
Howard's father gave us an acre of land, and we started building our house. We started out with two rooms. We went from an apartment, to one room, and then to two rooms with one child. We eventually had four children, and we built another room each time we had another baby. We ended up with five rooms, a bathroom, and a utility room.
Like so many of the young couples on Beulah Road at that time, we built our house ourselves, living in the house while we built it. For a time we had no water, no bathroom, not even any heat. We just kept at it as we worked our way up.
I had lived in the city all my life, and we always had indoor plumbing and running water. But as we were building our home, I had to wash clothes on a wash board, using water that I carried into the house, and heated. I never felt bad or embarrassed about it, but I did get tired of it. It made a woman out of me!
Howard and I never had a mortgage. We built onto the house as we could afford it, never going into debt. I remember when Howard found a picture window frame in a dump. It was in very good shape, so he cut it down to the size we needed, and then covered it with pasteboard. Each week he bought a new window until he had them all installed.
Mr. Gorham also gave Flemmie land on the front of his property, and gave Clarence land beside Flemmie, also on the front. He gave Eddie land on the back, with our land in between that of Clarence and Eddie. We were all building our houses at the same time, and were all living the same way – living in our houses as we built them. We were all raising our children at the same time, and all had gardens to help feed our families. At that time it was permissible to raise farm animals, and so we also raised hogs for food. There was a hog pen behind where Beulah Baptist Church was, and there were apple trees all along there.
The kids and I used to pick blackberries right there on Beulah Road, across from Brother Schurtz's house, where the old house used to be, and all out in back of my house. We went out there and picked the blackberries, and I used to make jam and all kinds of stuff. It was country back then.
Beulah Road was a narrow two-lane rural country road, and most of the people in the area lived in the same way. The houses along Beulah Road were spread out, and the area was heavily wooded. Most of the road had trees on both sides that leaned over the road, creating a sort of canopy of leaves.
Fleet Drive was a narrow dirt road, and Hayfield Road was a gravel road, badly rutted in washboard fashion. Any speed at all could bounce your vehicle right off the road into the ditch. Hayfield Road began where present-day Manchester Lakes Boulevard begins, going east off of Beulah, and then winding around southward and downhill, winding down to Telegraph Road, as it still does today. My father-in-law told me that his parents were buried on the hill at Hayfield Road, but he didn’t know exactly where. They died when he was very young. There was also supposedly a Rogers family burying ground on Hayfield Road, in the vicinity of where the IHOP is located today. Hayfield High School is built on a site that was marked as “Unknown Cemetery” on a Fairfax County map, and articles were published in local newspapers when skeletal remains were found while excavating in preparation for building the school.
Besides giving land to his children, Mr. Lee Gorham also donated land to be used for Beulah Cemetery, as well as for the building of the original Beulah Baptist Church.
His brother, Tom Gorham, owned land just south of Lee's land, on the opposite side of Beulah Road. Tom Gorham gave land to his children to build their homes, just as Lee Gorham had done for his children. The dirt road that led back to the homes of Tom Gorham's family was originally named Gorham Lane (later changed to Alforth Avenue when the townhouses were built). Because this area of Beulah Road was inhabited mostly by the families of the children of Lee Gorham and Tom Gorham, it was called Gorhamtown or Gorhamville by the local residents.
I wanted my children to go to church and learn about Jesus. I went to Christ Church for a long time, but when I moved to Franconia, I had no transportation to take them to an Episcopal church, so I sent them to Bradley Rogers' church, just a short distance up Beulah road from our house. It was called the Bethel Full Gospel Tabernacle. At the time they called it holy-roller, then it changed to Free Will Baptist or something like that, and my children came up with that religion. So as long as they knew about God and Jesus, I didn't really care what religion they were. The church changed again, and it is now Mount Calvary Community Church.