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Restored Historic Greenwood Cemetery Dedicated
A couple of hundred people – many of them among Buena Vista’s first residents – are buried in unmarked graves in a partially cleared area of woods off of East First Street, just up the road from Enderly Heights Elementary School.
These folks were remembered in a ceremony Monday morning dedicating the reclaimed, cleared and spruced up Greenwood Ceremony, a 134-year-old burying ground that hasn’t had a burial in 75 years.
“It is their shoulders that we stand on today,” said Preston Evans, whose grandparents are among those interred in the cemetery. These early Buena Vista residents, he said, “labored to build and maintain the factories, businesses and raise families.”
The cemetery, established at the city’s founding in the early 1890s, was initially intended for the city’s paupers. By 1895, over 80 burials had taken place there. At some point – the exact date is not known – the cemetery became a designated burial ground for the city’s African American community. Burials continued there until the late 1940s.
Evans remembers his mother bringing him to the cemetery more than 60 years ago, when he was a child. “It was a pristine place then,” he recalled, that was wellmaintained.
In subsequent years, after the last burials occurred, the cemetery wasn’t maintained. Brush and undergrowth overtook the graves. The grave markers/name plates mostly disappeared, with the exception of one for a Kate Curtis, who died in 1923. It seemed the cemetery was mostly forgotten, except by those who had family buried there.
“The area remained abandoned from the late 1940s until 2005,” said Evans. Then, a Boy Scout named Bryce Anderson did his Eagle Scout project on the cemetery. “He and his volunteer scouts flagged the graves and marked areas as evidenced by ground depressions, head stones, field markers and fences surrounding the grave sites,” said Evans. “Bryce and his group also attempted to clean out brush and undergrowth covering the graves. His work was remarkable because we would not have been able to locate many of these burial sites had it not been for the flags he laid down.”
In 2021, Evans was part of an ad hoc group of citizens, along with Mike Guinn, Jake Shewey and Valorie McInnes, who came to be known as the Friends of Greenwood Cemetery that, Evans recalled, undertook “a collaborative effort to honor the citizens interred there.” A memorandum of understanding to restore the cemetery was drawn up between the Friends group and the city of Buena Vista and approved on March 3, 2022.
“In the spring of 2022, the work of restoring the cemetery began in earnest,” said Evans. The work included clearing the burial grounds of underbrush, fallen trees, shrubs and debris. A wooden entrance gate was erected. A bulletin board was installed that tells the cemetery’s history, as was a memorial plaque with names etched into it of 47 people known to be buried there.
Joining Evans in speaking at the dedication ceremony Monday were his fellow Friends founders Shewey, Guinn and Valorie McInnes, as well as Buena Vista City Manager Jason Tyree. Tyree praised the efforts of the Friends founders. “It’s a testament to their dedication that we’re here today to keep the memories alive of those who came before us,” said Tyree. “The ones who are buried here are the working people who laid the foundation for what we have today.”
Shewey noted that “Volunteerism is alive and well in Buena Vista and Rockbridge County. This project wouldn’t have gotten done without the volunteers.”
He lauded the contributions of a couple of individuals who both died just as efforts were getting underway to restore the cemetery – Steve Douty, who surveyed the property and donated a portion of the land to the city; and Steve Guinn (Mike’s brother), a Pittsburgh resident who grew up in Buena Vista and took an interest in the project.
Mike Guinn, a Harrisonburg resident and 1964 graduate of Parry McCluer High School, said his mother, Carrie Lee Spence, was a 1924 graduate of then-Buena Vista High School. “Four generations of my family lived [in Buena Vista]. It was important to my brother that we not forget the people who are buried here.”
McInnes said numerous individuals, organizations and businesses have played roles in the cemetery project. She cited the example of the late Irma Thompson, a retired teacher and stalwart member of the Buena Vista African American community who supplied many of the names of people buried there. McInnes said a representative of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources came to town to visit the cemetery and offer advice on the restoration efforts.
The Washington and Lee University Nabors Service League, a group of Southern Virginia University students and a crew of inmates from the Rockbridge Regional Jail helped with cleaning up the cemetery. The Community Foundation made a monetary contribution. Crews from Virginia Dominion Power and Buena Vista’s public works department helped with the clearing of trees and debris.
“It was truly a community effort,” said Evans.
