Freedmen’s Cemetery (Historical Marker)

Here follows the inscription written on this roadside historical marker:

Freedmen’s Cemetery
Federal authorities established a cemetery here for newly freed African Americans during the Civil War. In January 1864, the military governor of Alexandria confiscated for use as a burying ground an abandoned pasture from a family with Confederate sympathies. About 1,700 freed people, including infants and black Union soldiers, were interred here before the last recorded burial in January 1869. Most of the deceased had resided in what was known as Old Town and in nearby rural settlements. Despite mid-twentieth-century construction projects, many burial sites remain undisturbed. A list of those interred here has also survived.

Erected 2000 by Department of Historic Resources. (Marker Number E-109.)


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Regarding Freedmen’s Cemetery:
Until recently a gas station stood on the site, but it has been razed and archaeological work is now being conducted prior to establishment of the Freedmen’s Cemetery Memorial Park on this site.

This site also boasted a very early projectile point, and as such is important to American Indians.

Alexandria [Va.] National Cemetery (Soldiers' Cemetery):
At first, Black soldiers who died in Alexandria were buried at Freedmen's Cemetery, established for "contrabands" (liberated slaves) in February 1864. This appears to have been instituted at the insistence of the Superintendent of Contrabands, Black clergyman Reverend Albert Gladwin.

African-American soldiers recuperating at L'Ouverture General Hospital were outraged, and in December 1864 more than 440 of them signed a petition demanding that Soldiers' Cemetery be opened to Blacks: "To crush this rebellion, and establish civil, religious, & political freedom for our children, is the hight [sic] of our ambition. To this end we suffer, for this we fight, yea and mingle our blood with yours . . . as soldiers in the U.S. Army. We ask that our bodies may find a resting place in the ground designated for the burial of the brave defenders of our countries [sic] flag."

The petitioners prevailed. ... and Black soldiers joined their fallen White comrades at Soldiers' Cemetery. Those already buried at Freedmen's Cemetery were re-interred.

Site construction explanation signage:
The City of Alexandria will develop this site into Freedmen’s Cemetery Memorial Park. Freedmen’s Cemetery (1864–1869) served as the burial place for about 1800 African Americans who fled to Alexandria to escape from bondage during the Civil War. Investigations have confirmed that intact burials remain on this property. The goal throughout the project is to insure than no burials are disturbed during park development. The memorial park will honor the memory of the Freedmen, the hardships they faced, and their contributions to the city.


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Here follows an excerpt from the Friends of Freedmen's Cemetery website:

A Brief History of Alexandria’s Freed People and of Freedmen’s Cemetery:
Alexandria’s early history is inextricable from the institution of slavery. Slaves and slave owners cultivated the land decades before the town was founded in 1749. There were few enterprises in which the labor of African Americans was not crucial, and much of the town can truly be said to have been built by slaves.

By 1790, Alexandria also had a substantial population of free blacks, manumitted by former owners. This community continued to grow until the Civil War—despite the ban on the international slave trade, which discouraged manumissions by raising the value of slaves, and despite harsh legal restrictions instituted in reaction to the Nat Turner rebellion.

After a century and a half of intensive tobacco and wheat cultivation, the soil of northern Virginia was largely played out. Many slaveholders took advantage of the opportunity to sell off their "surplus" slaves to dealers who would resell them in the high-demand labor market of the cotton-growing Deep South. One of the largest slave dealing firms in America, Franklin & Armfield, set up an office in Alexandria in the 1830s. Their fleet of three ships carried enslaved people away from Washington, Alexandria, Fredericksburg, the Shenandoah Valley, and environs to the faraway slave markets of New Orleans and Natchez.

Whether escaping from permanent servitude or from the threat of being sold South, many African Americans ran away from Alexandria slaveholders. Hundreds of runaway advertisements appear in newspapers from the mid eighteenth century until the Civil War. Documentation of Underground Railroad activity is, of course, sketchy in such a strong slave-holding area. There are, however, a few extant accounts of fugitives who passed through Alexandria en route to Canada.

When the Civil War broke out, enslaved African Americans had a better sense of where the conflict would lead than did the combatants themselves. Many predicted, as the inevitable outcome of an armed conflict between North and South, the "Jubilee," the end of slavery, when families would be reunited in freedom.

As Federal troops extended their occupation of the seceded states, African American refugees flooded into Union controlled areas. Safely behind Union lines, the cities of Alexandria and Washington offered not only comparative freedom, but employment. As Alexandria was transformed into a major supply depot and transport and hospital center, the freed people took positions with the army as construction workers, nurses and hospital stewards, longshoremen, painters, wood cutters, teamsters, laundresses, cooks, gravediggers and personal servants—and ultimately as soldiers and sailors.

Just out of slavery, most freed people were destitute by any standard. Among an undernourished, ill-housed population with inadequate health care, death was no stranger. Disease and high infant mortality were endemic. After hundreds of freed people had perished in the Alexandria area, the town desperately needed a new burying ground for them. At the urging of Alexandria’s Superintendent of Contrabands, Rev. Albert Gladwin, Military Governor John P. Slough ordered that an undeveloped parcel on South Washington Street be seized from its pro-Confederate owner as abandoned. By late February 1864, it had been opened as a cemetery for African Americans.

When a freed person died, a report was made to the Superintendent of Contrabands, and Rev. Gladwin would arrange for a funeral, if necessary. The family of the deceased was required to pay for the funeral, including a coffin supplied by the Quartermaster Department. The fee was waived only if the family was considered truly "indigent." A hearse would pick up the body as soon as possible and convey it to the cemetery for burial, sometimes on the same day. Graves were marked with whitewashed headboards, and the parcel was probably fenced in 1865.

While overseen by Rev. Gladwin, the day-to-day operation of the cemetery was under the supervision of head gravedigger, Randall Ward. A freed person himself, Ward was one of thirteen children, born in Spotsylvania County and later a slave of L.D. Winston in Culpeper County. He came to Alexandria about 1862 and first took a job as gravedigger at Penny Hill, the Soldiers’ Cemetery, or the Claremont Smallpox Hospital. Ward was assisted by Thomas Johnson and Hezekiah Ages, the latter a former slave from Fairfax County. Amy Briggs, a laundress, also labored in the cemetery in some capacity after the war to pay the rent on her room in the freed people’s barracks.

At first, black soldiers who died in Alexandria were buried at Freedmen’s Cemetery. African American troops in the town’s hospitals finally demanded to be accorded the honor of interment in the "Soldiers’ Cemetery" on Wilkes Street. About 75 deceased black veterans were removed from Freedmen’s Cemetery to the Alexandria National Cemetery in January 1865.

Alexandria’s freed people were mostly northern Virginians, but African Americans migrated here from most of Virginia and eastern Maryland. By 1868 there were arrivals from Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. Alexandria County’s black population temporarily grew to more than 8,700, or about half the total number of residents. This sudden influx stressed the local economy and transformed social relations. The people reshaped the landscape, occupying vacant buildings and army barracks, erecting shantytowns, buying building lots, and creating long-lasting rural communities. After ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the freed people provided the support necessary to put the first black Alexandrians in City Council and the Virginia legislature.

At war’s end, responsibility for Freedmen’s Cemetery was transferred to the new Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. When Congress curtailed nearly all Freedmen’s Bureau’s functions at the end of 1868, the cemetery, with its more than 1,700 burials, was closed. The parcel’s former owner, attorney Francis Smith, reclaimed it. For eight decades, it remained largely undisturbed, but the wood grave markers quickly rotted away. In 1917, the Smith family conveyed the property to the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, which maintained its own cemetery across the street. In 1946, the parcel was rezoned for commercial use and sold. A gas station was erected in 1955, followed by an office building. In spite of these, and the construction of Interstate Route 95 to the south, hundreds of graves probably remain.


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Here follows an excerpt from a press release from the City of Alexandria on March 19, 2007:

City of Alexandria Hosts Luminary Decorating Workshops In Preparation for Re-Dedication of Freedman’s Cemetery
Workshops Will Take Place on Saturday, March 24 and 31 and April 21, at Alexandria Archaeology Museum

The City of Alexandria will hold a re-dedication ceremony this spring to honor the 1,800 African-American men, women, and children buried at the Alexandria Freedmen's Cemetery from 1864 to 1869.

The re-dedication ceremony will include an illumination of 1,800 candle-lit bags, or luminaries, one for every person buried at the cemetery. Labeled with an individual=s name, age, and date of death, the bags will celebrate the lives of the forgotten people for the first time since the cemetery was abandoned in 1869.

In preparation for the ceremony, the Alexandria Archaeology Museum will host luminary decorating workshops on Saturday, March 24 and 31 and April 21, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the museum, located in the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St., third floor, studio 327. Once completed, the bags will be photographed, posted at www.FreedmensCemetery.org, and included in the illumination event. The workshops are free and open to the public.

The re-dedication ceremony is the beginning of a three-year process in which the City will demolish modern buildings, conduct an archaeological investigation to ensure the protection of the graves, and create the Alexandria Freedmen=s Memorial Park, scheduled to open in 2010.

The Freedmen=s Cemetery is located on the southwest corner of South Washington and Church streets. It has languished for 138 years and been subject to grading and construction.

Freedmen were enslaved African Americans who fled north during the Civil War in pursuit of freedom. Thousands of Freedmen sought refuge behind Union lines in towns like Alexandria. They lived in crowded barracks and shantytowns hastily constructed to accommodate their swelling numbers. For many, the Freedmen=s Cemetery was their final resting place.

The re-dedication ceremony is the first phase of the Alexandria’s Freedmen=s Memorial Park project, which is funded by the Federal Highway Administration and the Virginia Department of Transportation as part of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Improvement Project, the City of Alexandria, and the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures grant.


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