People's Memorial Cemetery

Twenty-eight members of Petersburg's large community of free African Americans purchased a one-acre tract to serve as a burial ground in 1840. Subsequent acquisitions of adjacent land created a cemetery complex later known as People’s Memorial. Buried here are slaves, an antislavery writer whose grave is listed on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a 19th-century member of the Virginia House of Delegates, veterans of the Civil War through World War II, and hundreds of other black residents. Numerous grave markers bearing the insignia of mutual aid societies and fraternal orders reflect the importance of these organizations to the community.