Terry,
The Potter's Field in Leesburg has become a matter of interest for the
Thomas Balch Library Commission in the past few years. It was in an area
just east of the old town, now a major crossroads and development area. It
served as a pauper's burial ground, for white and black with a dividing
line, for over 130 years from the 1830s to the early 1960s. It was the
center of a 1969 case that reached Virginia's highest court involving who
was responsible for its upkeep (the town had annexed the area from Loudoun
County in the late 1950s). Before some major road expansion and
development, the town contracted in 1982 with an archaeological team from
Williamsburg to excavate and evaluate the site. The team removed the bones
of over 80 bodies and estimated that there likely 300 more at the site.
Pressured by the highway department and the developers, the town forced the
team to sign off on their report and proceeded to pave over the site. The
set of 80 or more bones were re-interred at the Union Cemetery marked with
a simple plaque stating, "Unknown Citizens Reinterred From The Town Of
Leesburg's Cemetery, 1983". The Balch Commission is advocating that an
historical marker be placed at the site and that a more appropriate marker
should be placed in Union Cemetery. In 1902, the lynching of Charles Graven
occurred at the site (he was buried there) and the NAACP is putting up a
marker but it is about the lynching, only noting it was in Potter's Field.
Somehow, the town's records on the 1982-83 dig have disappeared. The
episode has been noted in a 2011 piece by Eugene Scheel in the Washington
Post. The Commission and the Balch Library staff have arranged for Lynn
Rainville to give a talk here in early December on the poor houses and
potter's fields of Virginia. It's part of our effort to give the issue more
visibility in the community.
Jim Hershman
Chair, Thomas Balch Library Advisory Commission
Town of Leesburg, Virginia
On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 3:12 PM Meyers, Terry L <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Several of my research reports on slavery at the College have recently
> been made available at
>
>
> https://www.wm.edu/sites/lemonproject/researchandresources/resourcesandresearch/index.php
>
> (Click on "Resources & Research at the College”)
>
> These include 1) my raw notes from the Faculty Minutes and Bursar’s Books
> trying to capture in some (sometimes rough) form all the allusions in each
> to slavery and the College’s enslaved, and 2) a report drawing on a
> long-forgotten account book by Thomas Roderick Dew to document the life and
> burial of “Joe,” an enslaved laborer at W&M. Dew records a payment for the
> burial of Joe, possibly off-campus and possibly at a potter’s field in
> Williamsburg that, I argue, likely existed in the 18th as well as the 19th
> C.
>
> I’d be grateful to learn of any work on potter’s fields in Virginia,
> especially their history.
>
> I might mention too the publication of my Encyclopedia Virginia article on
> Slavery at W&M:
>
>
> https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Slavery_at_the_College_of_William_and_Mary
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, College of
> William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia 23187
>
> http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/
>
>
> http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
> ————————————————————————————————————————————————————
>
> Have we got a college? Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't
> afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
> --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
>
>
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