Joseph Angel, 8 months old, came to Shockoe on Oct. 11, 1865, while on Feb. 11, 1882, the somewhat more fortunate Hannah, aged 74 years, was laid to rest.

The most prominent angel arises in triumph from the marker of Nannie Eupehmia Caskie. She died at age 61 in Florence, Italy, and was placed at Shockoe on June 23, 1893. Etched on the stone beneath the winged being is “MIZPEH.” The Hebrew word describes the view from a high place, or, a memorial shrine. Both definitions suit the cemetery, situated on a bluff at Fourth and Hospital streets.

Shockoe Hill is one of the city’s most historic yet least known burial grounds. For many years, it suffered from waning public attention and the vagaries of city budgets. Then in the fall of 2006, Doug Welsh, at the behest of the John Marshall Foundation and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, walked with some apprehension through the part-open door of the old keeper’s house. What he saw there changed his life.

8,000 Stories
Shockoe Hill appears to be farther from downtown than it is due to the rude interposition of interstate highway ramps.

Gilpin Court arose next door in what was once referred to as “ ’Postletown,” for streets named after James, John, Paul and Peter (and the apostolic quality of Charity).

The valley beneath Shockoe Hill is an unappealing assortment of scrub lots and industrial buildings dominated by the city jail. Razor wire is the motif, and a long freight train can delay a visitor’s approach from the southeast on Hospital Street.

Shockoe Hill’s current circumstance is predicated — as much as it ever has been — on the situation of nearby neighborhoods. City proposals under consideration for remaking Gilpin Court or a new location for the jail will affect Shockoe’s visibility and accessibility in its third century.

After the cemetery of St. John’s Church filled up in the early 1800s and before Hollywood’s memorial park glamour outshone it, Shockoe received the bulk of Richmond’s dead.

Chief Justice John Marshall is there alongside his “Polly,” Mary Willis Ambler.  Here, too, are Richmond’s first mayor, physician William Foushee; Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew; and John Allan, the temperamental Scottish merchant who became the warder of the orphaned Edgar Poe. Several of Poe’s boyhood friends are here, as is the inspiration for his poem, “To Helen,” Jane Stith Craig Stanard, who went insane and died when Poe was just 15.

Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, Poe’s childhood sweetheart, was a middle-aged widow by the time he returned to Richmond in the summer of 1849 and resumed a courtship. She outlived him by several decades, coming to Shockoe in February 1888.

At least two African-American women are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery. They were both family domestics and, due to Richmond’s segregation, required official dispensation to receive memorial in a majority-white graveyard.

Lucy Taylor, who died May 22, 1882, was, as her stone describes, the “Mammy Nurse In The Family of Wm. C. Allen/ Faithful Unto Death.” Lucy Armstead, buried Dec. 31, 1895, was the servant of Dr. Woodbridge, 701 E. Grace St. “Buried by Special Ordinance,” the internment card notes.

And here is Mrs. McCormick, age unrecorded, first name not given. She was Shockoe’s first official burial, April 10, 1822. Almost two centuries later, in 2003, came two veterans, Thomas M. Bliley of the Marine Corps and Bernard Gerard Bliley, who’d served in the Air Force.

Between Mrs. McCormick and the Blileys are some 8,000 others, each with a story signified by the space between dates on the headstones.

From Order to Chaos
Shockoe Hill’s 1822 opening signified in Richmond a shift away from small rural and family burying grounds. As historian Tyler Potterfield explains in his Nonesuch Place: A History of the Richmond Landscape, by the late 18th century, cities began creating “large and orderly places of burial tranquilly situated away” from their centers.

By 1815, clustered along ridges north of town overlooking Bacon’s Quarter Branch came several graveyards. The Burying Ground Society for the Free People of Color established the Phoenix Burial Grounds north of the stream. Eventually, this evolved into the Barton Heights cemeteries.

A city almshouse was completed around 1800, and in 1816, the city’s Jewish population acquired an acre of its land because their Franklin Street Burial Ground (the site remains in Shockoe) was full. This evolved into the Hebrew Cemetery adjacent to Shockoe.

When landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted visited Shockoe in 1852, he described the then-5-acre Shockoe Hill as a “neat, rural ground, well-filled with monuments and evergreens.”

But by 1866, an editorialist for the Richmond Whig went ambling about the cemetery attempting to decipher famous names from fading engravings. The condition of the grounds was less then desirable, too, and with some alteration for modern sensibilities, this description could’ve been written in 1936 or 1996: “There is some difficulty in finding the graves of many of the citizens of mark who are buried in these grounds,” the Whig writer testifies. “Some of the monuments are covered with weeds and shrubbery and not easily accessible, and others are protected from intrusion by lock and key; others still are so defaced that the letters are scarcely legible.”

In 1931, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes visited the tomb of his great predecessor, John Marshall. Hughes planned to place a wreath and give a brief address. The event went awry when several containers of bootleg whiskey “were found reposing in the sarcophagus on Marshall’s grave,” recalled historian Virginius Dabney. (The incident may have amused Marshall, who liked his drink and wasn’t much on ceremony).