Would the Bruton Parish Poorhouse have had a burial ground that might have
served as a potter's field?



On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 8:38 AM Meyers, Terry L <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I can’t seem to find any scholarly histories or accounts of potter’s
> fields in colonial Virginia—can anyone help?
>
> Many burials of whites, of course, were in family plots and churchyards.
> And many enslaved would have been buried on land set aside for that at
> plantations.
>
> But there were many indigent whites and free Blacks as well as the
> enslaved in urban households who must have been interred someplace.
>
> I ask because in seeking the burial place for the hundreds of men, women,
> and children enslaved by William and Mary over some 172 years, I for a long
> time assumed it would be on our original 330 acres.  But we have no
> documentation of such a site and a place that seemed most likely gave up no
> evidence of graves.
>
> I did finally find a record from 1837 of W&M’s president, Thomas Roderick
> Dew, apparently outsourcing the burial of “Joe,” an expense Dew noted as
> ".50 cts for digging Joes Grave + ,50 $4 to R. Bucktrout          5 00.”
> R. Bucktrout was Richard Manning Bucktrout, the son of Benjamin Bucktrout,
> both, among other things, undertakers to rich and poor, Black and white.*
>
> Behind the Bucktrout house (and today just east of the Williamsburg Inn)
> is an extensive burial ground for which I can make a compelling case (I
> think) for its being a very old potter’s field containing the graves of,
> among others, the French soldiers who died in Williamsburg after the Siege
> of Yorktown.
>
> There’s some evidence, in fact, that more than the indigent were buried
> there—it may have been something akin to a main burial ground before the
> opening in 1859 of Williamsburg’s municipal cemetery, Cedar Grove.
>
> Dew’s note make me think that perhaps Joe was buried off campus, perhaps
> behind the Bucktrout house.   I had always assumed that the College’s
> enslaved would bury their own, but if Joe’s burial was outsourced, perhaps
> others were as well.
>
> As far as I can tell, btw, other colleges and universities appear to have
> buried those they enslaved on their own grounds, so if I’m right W&M would
> be an outlier…..
>
>
> *See RMB’s Daybook and Ledger for more:
>
>
> https://libraries.wm.edu/um/archive/bucktrout//cf.swem.wm.edu/exhibits/bucktrout/
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College of
> William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg  23187
>
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