Long-neglected cemetery is obscured by a city-owned maintenance yard

Behind the Gate
Long-neglected cemetery is obscured by a city-owned maintenance yard.

By Michael Lee Pope
Thursday, March 19, 2009

Long before City Hall began purchasing plots of land that were later assembled to become Fort Ward Park, Elizabeth Douglas attended a one-room schoolhouse that was located on what is now the eastern edge of the park. She has fond memories of visiting the family burial yard outside the school where members of a community that old-timers still refer to as "the fort." There, outside of the schoolhouse, Douglas says, 10 to 15 bodies were buried in red mud under homemade concrete markers. In the 1950s, a woman she called "Aunt Clara" was buried there — a beloved matron of the community whose grave she visited often.

But the next few years would bring rapid change that would distance her and Aunt Clara.

First the City of Alexandria moved its boundaries westward, then officials began buying plots of land in an effort to create a new park at the old Civil War fort where a Connecticut artillery brigade guarded against Confederate attack from a road then known as the Alexandria turnpike. So city officials bought land from Eagle Crest Development in the late 1950s to head off a proposed subdivision on the western end of the park. Although some of the African-American properties on the eastern edge of the land had clouded titles in the early 1960s, the city eventually got everything it wanted after condemning some of the properties and paying fair-market value to the families who had lived there since Reconstruction.

"Who would want someone to uproot you and buy your place out?" asked Douglas, 87, who still lives in the house she grew up in across from T.C. Williams High School. "That’s what they did."

THE STORY OF HOW a city-owned maintenance yard ended up over a family cemetery is a story that dates back to a time when Robert E. Lee’s cousin owned a slave plantation nearby known as Menokin. When the Civil War erupted, the Union army seized land adjacent to the plantation owned by the Hooff family and began building an earthen fort to serve as a supply base south of the Potomac River. After the war was over, the Union Army deserted the property and recently freed slaves began squatting on the land. By the time the city was trying to assemble lands to create Fort Ward Park in the 1960s, determining the titleholders to houses with no plumbing or sewer service created a problem.

"There may have been people who didn’t want to sell but realized that their community was changing," said Wally Owen, curator at Fort Ward Park. "What’s frustrating about this is that we don’t have the full record of what went on back then."

The family burial ground where Clara Adams was buried in 1953 next to other family members eventually became a maintenance yard where city officials store horticultural equipment and park vehicles. On the occasions that Douglas has returned to an area she still calls "the fort," she has become outraged that access to the cemetery is blocked by a gate to prevent people from entering the maintenance yard. Douglas said that seeing the padlocked gate is a painful reminder of how city officials treated black families when they were trying to create Fort Ward Park in the 1960s.

"I just think they were racial," she said one recent afternoon while sitting at her dinner table. "Those people were prejudiced, and that’s all there is to it."

LATE LAST YEAR, the city’s park planning staff issued a study that concluded the park was suffering from too much use. As a result, neighbors who live near the park began attending a series of community meetings to solicit ideas for recommendations to the Parks and Recreation Commission. During one of these community meetings earlier this month, a discussion about the long-neglected family burial yard prompted concern among several neighbors.

"Our main goal is to improve operation and management of the park," said Dave Cavanaugh, a neighbor who has constructed a timeline of events at Fort Ward Park. "We’d like to see a more diverse interpretation of African-American history during and after the Civil War."

The community meetings led to an effort of several city officials to interview several individuals who remember what the area was like before the city started acquiring properties in the late 1950s. The interviews have led to a realization by modern-day city officials that more bodies had been buried near the Clara Adams grave than were previously known. Now that the archeology at the Freedman’s Cemetery on South Washington Street has been completed, a similar undertaking is beginning to determine how city officials should proceed with the Adams family burial ground in the Fort Ward maintenance yard. This week, the Department of Recreation, Parks and Cultural Activities scheduled another public meeting to gather ideas about what should happen at the park.

"I think if everybody puts their heads together we’ll all be able to come up with a good process," said City Archeologist Pam Cressey. "But we’ll need to have plenty of discussion about this before we make a decision."