Competition Launched for Memorial to Freedmen

After more than a century of neglect, the cemetery where lay the bodies of nearly 2,000 African Americans who had fled slavery to come north to Union-occupied Alexandria is finally getting its due. The City of Alexandria has just announced an international design competition, asking architects, artists and designers to create an appropriate and lasting memorial.

The Contrabands and Freedmen's Cemetery Memorial will cover about three acres owned by the city and the Virginia Department of Transportation at Washington and Church streets in Old Town. Designs for the project will be accepted until April 25, with a $10,000 prize for first place, $5,000 for second place and $2,500 for third. The budget for constructing the winning design is expected to run as high as $2 million.

"This call for entries was sent to design schools and architecture and design firms nationally and internationally," said Emily Baker, a city engineer who works with the Freedmen's Cemetery steering committee, which runs the competition. "We're hoping to attract designers from all around the world -- students, professionals, anyone who might be moved by the story and feel they have something to contribute."

The story of Freedmen's Cemetery, like the souls buried there, has slept uneasily, and the history of the site forgotten as it was paved over and built upon. Brick makers of the 19th century disturbed graves as they dug for clay. Freeway builders of the 20th century disturbed countless others as they constructed a retaining wall for the Beltway. Archeologists found the marks of a backhoe through one coffin. Most recently, it was home to a full-service gas station.

"Clearly, the site has not been considered a sacred place of burial," City Archeologist Pam Cressey said.

In a speech last week to kick off the design competition, Cressey said that in the past eight months of excavating the site, she and her team of archeologists have found more than 500 graves, more than half of them of children.

"And undoubtedly there are hundreds of graves surviving," she said, referring to an area underneath the thick concrete slab that held an office building and another slab that supported the gas station. "It's probably not unreasonable to think there are one thousand graves that have survived the onslaught of what's happened there."

A memorial, which is to include the names of those buried, will have so much to tell.

In 1861, when Virginia seceded from the Union and the Civil War began, thousands of Union troops moved in to occupy the strategically located Alexandria. As the war raged, perhaps as many as 20,000 African American slaves, many on foot, carrying nothing and hoping only for freedom, flooded into the city. U.S. officials began calling them "contraband of war" and refused to return them to their former owners.

Conditions, Cressey said, were horrendous. Many lived in shanties or crowded into abandoned buildings. Few had wood for fires in the winter or more than the clothing on their backs. When they began to die, U.S. officials seized the land of a Confederate sympathizer on Washington Street near the southern edge of town and began laying the dead to rest there.

A surviving record book tells what little is left of their stories. Name. Date of burial. Sometimes the cause of death. Baltimore, infant. Buried 5 July 1868. Stillborn. Cooper, Page. Buried 10 Dec. 1865. Ten years. Roy, Mary Eliza. Buried 7 September 1868. Three years.

"Some hospital records we do have show that there were a high number of deaths due to respiratory illness or arthritis, though it's hard to believe that people actually died of arthritis," Cressey said. "A lot of the problems could have been due to malnutrition or dehydration."

Or smallpox. Although there were vaccines at the time, Cressey said, "apparently the Freedmen were not always inoculated." Many were taken to a separate smallpox hospital, where they died, she said.

For a time, soldiers from the U.S. Colored Troops were buried there, until, in what Cressey calls the first known civil rights demonstration in Alexandria, in December 1864, the graves were moved to the National Cemetery at the foot of Wilkes Street.

Once the war was over and the U.S. government moved out, no one remained to maintain the Freedmen's Cemetery. The original property owners sued for reparations, and, when no damages were awarded, they sold part of the property and deeded the rest to the Archdiocese of Richmond, which, in turn, sold it to developers.

And the story of the Freedmen, their often short lives and painful deaths, faded from view.

"We do know that in 1939, for one year on the tax records, it was noted as a Negro Burial Ground, so, in 1939, at least the tax collector knew about it," Cressey said. "And we did find reports in the Washington Post writing about how the cemetery was neglected in the 1890s." Brickbuilders from nearby brickyards were getting their clay there, she said, and the newspaper wrote of coffins and bones being desecrated.

It wasn't until 1987 that city historians "re-discovered" the cemetery. Since then, groups such as the Friends of Freedmen's Cemetery and the Alexandria Black History Museum have held vigils, pushed for a state interpretive sign on the property and urged the city to buy the property for $8 million.

In excavating the site, Cressey found so much more to the story -- more than 3,000 Native American artifacts, stone tools, and spear and arrow points. One item goes back 13,000 years.

Louis Hicks, director of the Alexandria Black History Museum, said any memorial will have to tell many stories, of Native Americans, of the slaves' struggle for freedom, of years of neglect. It will have to be somber and respectful. A place for people to contemplate.

"We'd like to see something as a fitting tribute that both captures the spirit of the people that are buried on the site and to make sure it is something that people will continue to remember into the future, so that something like this can never happen again -- so that a gas station can never desecrate the graves of enslaved people again," Hicks said.

"The story it will need to tell is an ongoing story of how African Americans have striven to become part of this nation and the ongoing struggle to be incorporated and recognized as full citizens deserving of respect.

"Neighborhoods have been destroyed or removed for the sake of urban renewal," Hicks said. "Graveyards have been desecrated. I see this as a kind of ongoing story to help solidify the place that people of African descent have as part of an American story."