What is the project you have been working on?

The project is a little bit of everything. I started off as a student researcher under Dr. Ryan Smith with the Richmond Cemetery Collaboratory when the initial project was developing an online walking tour of Evergreen Cemetery. It bundled into a UROP Fellowship last summer, and then in the fall, I jumped into an internship with Humans of RVA in the Honors College. We took everything that I had been working on and turned it into a community outreach project. I took some VCU students out to Evergreen and hosted a panel with community members and academics, and built a really good working relationship with the Honors College and Cemetery Collaborative.

What do you hope this project will do for the community?

I am looking forward to seeing Evergreen become a spot for the community to grow and learn and have a space that’s outside. I think it’s a great historical resource for the community, and I believe that we can do big things with it, especially since it is no longer an active cemetery. We have the opportunity to make it more of a historical site and really capture what that means for the community. 

For me, I just love the stories that come out of it. Evergreen and all the other cemeteries have a lot of hidden stories. There are so many people who have made contributions to Richmond and things that we are actively participating in today that we don’t know about. One of my favorite stories is of Dr. Sarah Garland Jones. So much has been going on at Virginia Union with the hospital she started there. So many people don’t know the history behind it and why it is an important place to preserve, as well as her importance to the community because she was a crucial person for mother and childcare in Richmond. We have the Maggie Walkers and the John Mitchell Jrs that everyone has heard of, but there are other historical figures who aren’t as well known.

Have you come across any roadblocks in your work?

The biggest roadblock, which over the past six months has become less of a roadblock, was in the initial phases of starting the tour and planning everything. Half the grave sites we had planned for the tour were in parts of the cemetery you just couldn’t get to or weren’t safe due to overgrowth. We didn’t want to have people trekking through the woods to try and find the spots, so trying to navigate to these important sites we wanted to include but couldn’t was a big roadblock.

For example, the Braxton Mausoleum, which is across from Maggie Walker’s grave, finally gets consistent landscaping. However, this site has seen a lot of vandalism. The site was broken into, and some remains were disturbed. We’d like to include it on the tour, but we’re unsure who is still interred there. While we have death certificates and records of those originally buried, some remains were severely damaged, making identification difficult.

How did you get involved with the IMPACT Conference?

They [IMPACT] reached out to one of our collaborative members who was leading our presentation, who then asked if I wanted to participate. I went in and shared a little bit about developing the tour, and discussed my work with the Honors College such as the cemetery tours and the revamping of the Community Coalition, a volunteer-focused club, which has bettered the relationship with the Collaboratory.

Do you plan on continuing to do work for the cemetery?

Yeah! Dr. Smith has plans to continue working on the tour this summer. I plan on joining the Collaboratory as a community member, as well as continuing to work with Friends of East End and the volunteer work that they’re doing. In the year-and-a-half that I’ve been working with them, to see what’s happened at Evergreen and the conditions that it has and the waves it’s going through, it’s exciting to see and I hope that I get to see what Woodland is building towards happen at Evergreen. It would be great.

Do you have a timeline of progress?

They are having a cultural landscape report coming out this spring, which will give them a good reference on where to start. In an ideal world, five years would be great, but realistically it’s probably going to be closer to 10 years. Woodland has consistent efforts, they’re closer to year 10 and they just started building their endowment. They have a goal that by 2030 to start construction of their education center. We have city backing, which they don’t, so I’m curious to see how that will differentiate the outcomes for the two.

Final thoughts?

The biggest thing is, just do it. For me, I had just heard about things and thought, “Well, it’s just not necessarily for me.” Going in, I had the general K-12 history education. Then in college, I had a few classes here and there that focused on it, but it was nothing that made me feel qualified to be doing this research. However, there are so many people involved who are willing to take a step back and sit with you and answer questions. Even if you just come out for a day and still think it isn’t for you, there are so many other ways to get involved, such as archival work or transcriptions, pieces of writing, and taking pictures. So just do it. It’s so good for the community, you get to meet so many people who have lived in Richmond their whole lives and the stories they have are eye-opening. There is a whole side of Richmond that you get to unlock.