Black cemetery doubt remains

He served alongside Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in the famed Stonewall Brigade during the Civil War. He was portrayed in Ron Maxwell’s movie “Gods and Generals.” He was one of a select few who tended to Jackson as the general lay dying. Yet Jackson’s most respected biographer, James I. Robertson Jr., said of this man: “Of the people intimately associated with the general, less is known of this figure than any other person.”

No photograph of him is known to exist. The exact location of his final resting place, sadly, remains unmarked and unknown. Who was this mysterious figure? His name was Jim Lewis. He was a slave, and his story is connected to yet another mystery in Lexington, Va.

During the years of slavery and Reconstruction, a segregated cemetery for blacks was established within the town limits of Lexington. This cemetery encompassed an area bordered roughly by what today are North Lewis Street, Washington Street and Marble Lane. By 1880, the cemetery was filling rapidly and falling into neglect.

Many of the dead were identified originally by simple wooden markers — long since rotted — and some not at all. Though records are somewhat sketchy, research seems to indicate that prospective white developers were as much an impetus for what happened next as were blacks concerned about the condition of the graves of their ancestors and loved ones.

Over several years, petitions from the community had been presented to the town council asking that the town move the “colored dead from the present burial ground” to a new site.

Seeing an opportunity for himself as well as a way to address the issue of a new cemetery for blacks, local judge William McLaughlin made an offer to the town council to exchange six acres of property he owned just outside the town limits for a portion — approximately three acres — of the existing black burial ground.

Apparently some blacks opposed the plan and made it known that they wished to express their views on the subject. A motion to table the judge’s offer and hear out the petitioners lost by one vote.

Capt. G.W. Pettigrew, a member of the council who ran a confectionery that sold shotguns as well as sweets, resigned in protest after the vote.

The remaining council members instructed a committee to meet with the town attorney and proceed with the exchange. Eventually, the black petitioners were heard, but to no avail. Evidently, the land exchange offered by the powerful Judge McLaughlin was a done deal.

McLaughlin already had shown disregard for the concerns of Lexington’s blacks by being party to a legal threat against Stonewall Jackson in 1858 over Jackson’s “colored Sabbath school,” which McLaughlin considered an “unlawful assembly” when it was still illegal in Virginia to teach blacks to read.

Ironically, McLaughlin would later give a dedication speech at Jackson’s life-sized bronze statue, unveiled over the Confederate general’s grave in 1891. The statue had been funded, in part, by some of Jackson’s former black students.

As the year progressed, the town engineer enclosed the new cemetery, prepared an entrance and laid out the grounds for lots. In October 1880, the town council ordered that further burial of the dead in the old cemetery be “discontinued.”

A month later, the council accepted the McLaughlin deed in exchange for a portion of the original black cemetery, with the town of Lexington apparently retaining the remainder of the property.

The saga of the original cemetery ostensibly came to a close in the summer of 1881 with the appointment of a “Board of Trustees of competent colored people” supervised by the mayor and town council. The board administered the new cemetery (named Evergreen) sold lots and kept a separate account for operations.

The new trustees included William Washington, William Drummond, Edmund W. White, James Humble, James “Deacon” Jackson, William S. Harvey and Randall Talbott. Both Humble and Jackson were free blacks before the war, and Humble had served in the Confederate army.

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