Shockoe Hill Burying Ground Historic District

The Shockoe Hill Burying Ground Historic District, located in the city of Richmond, Virginia, is a significant example of a municipal almshouse-public hospital-cemetery complex of the sort that arose in the period of the New Republic following disestablishment of the Anglican Church.

The District illustrates changing social and racial relationships in Richmond through the New Republic, Antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow/Lost Cause eras of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Shockoe Hill Burying Ground Historic District occupies 43 acres (17 ha) of land bounded to the south by E. Bates Street, to the north by the northern limit of the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority (previously the CSX rail line) right-of-way (City of Richmond parcel #N0000233022) at the southern margin of the Bacon's Quarter Branch valley, to the west by 2nd Street, and to the east by the historic edge of the City property at the former location of Shockoe Creek.

[1][2] The Shockoe Hill Burying Ground Historic District was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register on March 17, 2022.

The district features a suite of municipal functions and services concerned with matters of public welfare, health, and safety, which the City of Richmond relegated to its then-periphery on its northern boundary during the nineteenth century.

This view is from the eastern edge of the hill of the Hebrew Cemetery looking northeast across 5th St. to the original 1816 site of the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground.