Qualla: Old City Cemetery

Old City Cemetery: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wcedmisten, CC BY 4.0. John Lynch and his wife Mary gave the City of Lynchburg one acre on a hill on the west side of the road to New London in March 1806. The deed said the land was to be used as a public burying ground or for a house of worship — and "for no other purpose whatsoever." Two centuries later, the Old City Cemetery is still doing exactly what John and Mary Lynch said it should do. Twenty-seven acres of green hill above downtown, an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 people resting here, and two-thirds of those burials are African American. It is the oldest municipal cemetery still in use in Virginia, and one of the oldest in the United States. It is also, today, an arboretum and a history park and a working rose garden, the last of which holds one of the largest public collections of heirloom roses in the South.

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Image: Wcedmisten | CC BY 4.0

Old City Cemetery: Who Lies Here

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. The burials in Old City Cemetery represent an unusually broad cross-section of the early American South. There are the founding families of Lynchburg — Lynches and Cabells and Daniels — buried in marked plots near the entrance. There are German and Irish immigrants who came to wo...

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Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Old City Cemetery: Ota Benga

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Image copyright 2005 by user G. Edward Johnson (user Lorax) and released under the terms of the GFDL, CC BY-SA 3.0. One of the most heartbreaking American stories ends — probably — in this cemetery. Ota Benga was a Congolese man, born around 1883, first brought to the United States by the businessman Samuel Verner for display at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and then — after a return to Afr...

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Old City Cemetery: The Pest House and the Lynchburg Method

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. The cemetery includes four small house museums. The most striking is the Pest House Medical Museum — a quarantine hospital that served Lynchburg through the nineteenth century, where patients with smallpox, scarlet fever, and yellow fever were isolated. The phrase Lynchburg Metho...

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Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Old City Cemetery: A Garden, Too

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ken Lund from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Since the 1990s the cemetery has also been operated as an arboretum and rose garden. The Southern Memorial Association — a Lynchburg women's group founded in 1866 to maintain Confederate graves and later expanded to care for the whole cemetery — has overseen the planting and main...

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Image: Ken Lund from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0