Qualla: Shockoe Hill Cemetery

Shockoe Hill Cemetery: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeffrycb, CC BY-SA 4.0. Inside a quiet walled enclosure on the north edge of old Richmond, Chief Justice John Marshall lies a few yards from Elizabeth Van Lew, the Union spymaster who fed intelligence out of the Confederate capital while pretending to be a harmless eccentric. Peter Francisco, the giant of the Revolution who fought at Brandywine and Camden, is here. So is Frances Allan, the foster mother Edgar Allan Poe came home to visit on the hill. So are at least four hundred veterans of the War of 1812 - believed to be the largest such assemblage in any American cemetery. The graves go quiet under old oaks. And right across the wall, across Hospital Street, lies an unmarked field where more than twenty-two thousand free and enslaved Black Richmonders are buried with no stones at all.

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Image: Jeffrycb | CC BY-SA 4.0

Shockoe Hill Cemetery: Richmond's First Municipal Cemetery

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jmurden, CC BY-SA 3.0. The City of Richmond bought 28 and a half acres on its northern edge in 1799 for several purposes: a poorhouse, and a burying ground for white residents. The cemetery section opened in 1820 - then called the New Burying Ground, later the Shockoe Hill Burying Ground - with the fir...

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Image: Jmurden | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shockoe Hill Cemetery: John Marshall and the Federalist Generation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kobenon, CC0. Chief Justice John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the United States and the man who shaped the Supreme Court's role in American constitutional law, lies here with his wife Mary Willis Ambler Marshall. The crypts are simple. Marshall lived most of his adult life in Richmond...

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Image: Kobenon | CC0

Shockoe Hill Cemetery: Elizabeth Van Lew's Network

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:AlbertHerring, CC BY 3.0. Of all the graves here, the one that puzzles outsiders most is Elizabeth Van Lew's. Van Lew was a Richmond-born abolitionist who never left the city - and who, throughout the Civil War, ran one of the most effective Union intelligence networks in the Confederacy from her family's...

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Image: User:AlbertHerring | CC BY 3.0

Shockoe Hill Cemetery: Peter Francisco and the War of 1812

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:AlbertHerring, CC BY 3.0. Peter Francisco arrived in Virginia as a small child, dropped on a wharf at City Point with no English and no family, in 1765. He grew to six and a half feet tall and weighed over 260 pounds. He fought in the Continental Army at Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point, Camd...

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Image: User:AlbertHerring | CC BY 3.0

Shockoe Hill Cemetery: Poe Visited Here

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:AlbertHerring, CC BY 3.0. Edgar Allan Poe grew up in Richmond, the foster son of the merchant John Allan and his wife Frances. Frances Allan - the beloved foster mother who raised him - is buried here. So is John Allan. So is Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, the woman Poe loved as a teenager, returned to as ...

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Image: User:AlbertHerring | CC BY 3.0