Old City Cemetery

Q-6-25

Old City Cemetery, also known as the Methodist Cemetery, was established as a public burial ground in 1806 on land donated by John Lynch, founder of Lynchburg. Mayors and other prominent civic leaders, along with the city's indigent and “strangers,” are among the estimated 20,000 people buried here. Three quarters of those interred here are of African descent, both enslaved and free. The cemetery’s Confederate section contains the graves of more than 2,200 soldiers from 14 states. Museums on the property interpret the diverse history of this rehabilitated graveyard and its inhabitants. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Department of Historic Resources, 2005

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Ted Delaney, Phillip Wayne Rhodes, Free Blacks of Lynchburg, Virginia, 1805-1865 (Lynchburg, Va.: Warwick House Publishing, 2001); Database of Burials of Old City Cemetery, Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia; Diuguid Burial Records, Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia; Calder Loth, ed., The Virginia Landmarks Register, 4th. ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 289; Evelyn Lee Moore, Behind the Old Brick Wall; Cemetery Story (Lynchburg: Lynchburg Committee of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1968); Old City Cemetery, National Register of Historic Places Archives File (118-27), Department of Historic Resources, Richmond, Virginia; Old City Cemetery, http://www.gravegarden.org/, 29 November 2005.