Every hard rain told the truth. When storms hit Shockoe Valley in the early 1800s, the creek that ran alongside Richmond's designated burial ground for Black residents would swell and wash bodies from their graves. Christopher McPherson, a formerly enslaved free man of color, described these conditions in an 1811 book and petitioned the city council for a new cemetery. The city eventually complied, opening a replacement burial ground on Shockoe Hill in 1816. But the original site along Shockoe Creek was not preserved. It was paved over, built upon, and forgotten, its dead rendered invisible beneath layers of asphalt and amnesia, until a local historian named Elizabeth Kambourian spotted it on an old map nearly two centuries later.
In 1799, the city of Richmond acquired two parcels of land for municipal burial grounds. The arrangement was telling. A generous 28-and-a-half-acre plot on the northern end of Shockoe Hill, straddling the city-county boundary, was purchased primarily for the burial of white residents. A much smaller parcel in Shockoe Valley was designated for the interment of Black individuals, both enslaved and free. On Richard Young's 1809 Plan of the City of Richmond, the site appears simply as the 'Burial Ground for Negroes.' The location was poorly suited for its purpose, prone to flooding along Shockoe Creek. After 1804, the city gallows were erected on the same ground, and the 1809 plan shows a powder magazine there as well. In this one small parcel, Richmond concentrated its dead, its condemned, and its explosives, all on land it had set aside for its Black population.
When Elizabeth Kambourian rediscovered the burial ground in the 1990s, the site was initially believed to be where Gabriel, the leader of an ambitious 1800 slave rebellion, and some of his followers were executed and buried. Gabriel's Conspiracy, as it became known, had planned to seize Richmond's capitol and armory with an army of enslaved people. The plot was betrayed before it could unfold, and Gabriel and his co-conspirators were hanged. Subsequent research, however, pointed to different locations for the executions. Gabriel and his followers were reportedly hanged on Gallows Hill near the intersection of 1st Street and Canal Street. An 1871 front-page article in the Daily Dispatch reported that Gabriel and others involved in the insurrection were buried in a burying ground attached to the 'old Baptist Church,' originally established as the Richmond Baptist Church in 1780 on Cary Street. Human remains discovered during house construction at the corner of Cary and 3rd Streets in 1871 fueled speculation that these were the bones of Gabriel, Solomon, and Peter.
Once the Shockoe Hill burying grounds opened in 1816, the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground closed to new interments and was repurposed without ceremony. A Lancastrian School was constructed directly on the site that same year. The city jail followed later. Graves were destroyed. The burial ground disappeared from the visible landscape and from living memory. By the time Kambourian found it marked on a historical map, the site had become a parking lot. Around 2004, Virginia Commonwealth University acquired the property, which prompted a new wave of activism. The Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project, a project of the Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality, formed to advocate for the site's reclamation and proper stewardship. What had been an invisible piece of asphalt became the center of a movement to reckon with Richmond's role as a hub of the domestic slave trade.
Public commemoration began during the Elegba Folklore Society's annual Juneteenth celebration in 2002, when participants acknowledged the burial ground beneath the asphalt. Each year since, the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project has hosted the Gabriel Gathering every October at the site, honoring Gabriel and those who participated in the 1800 rebellion while advocating for the broader preservation of Shockoe Bottom's history. The effort has grown into the Shockoe Project, an initiative to create a comprehensive historical destination in Shockoe Valley recognizing the full story of enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent in Richmond. On October 10, 2024, at the 22nd Annual Gabriel Gathering, a Virginia Department of Historic Resources highway marker was unveiled at the site, formally designating the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground as Richmond's First Municipal African Cemetery. The sister site on Shockoe Hill, which operated from 1816 to 1879, is estimated to hold over 22,000 individuals, making it the largest known burial ground for free people of color and the enslaved in the United States.
Located at 37.537°N, 77.428°W in Shockoe Bottom, Richmond, Virginia. The site is at 1554 E Broad Street, across from the former location of Lumpkin's Jail. Shockoe Bottom sits in a low valley along Shockoe Creek, east of downtown Richmond. The area is identifiable from the air by the I-95 overpass running through the neighborhood. Nearest airports: Richmond International (KRIC) approximately 6 nm southeast; Hanover County (KOFP) approximately 12 nm north. Best viewed at 1,500-2,500 ft AGL.