There is underfoot on this campus, a history that most have never heard. And like many other American institutions, colleges, universities, churches, the university is digging into its past, trying to reconcile the lofty ideals of today with the more complex and fraught past. The University of Richmond, founded in 1840 as Richmond College, occupied this building in downtown Richmond.
Before the university moved to its current location in 1914, the land was occupied by the West Hampton Amusement Park. The park had been built by a trolley company to encourage ridership. We know that the hill, which we now know as Boatwright, was used as a casino.
It was a two-story, open-sided building that would have been used for dancing. They had shooting galleries, a merry-go-round, or carousel right in front of the lake. There were terrace steps made out of earth and they would have movies or moving pictures on a screen.
There were aerialists that performed here. We even know some of the names of those. There was a well-known performing group, Polk Miller and his quartet.
The trolley company hired the Frederick Law Olmsted Company to design the amusement park. Olmsted is best known for designing New York City's Central Park. This is the map Olmsted made for the West Hampton Amusement Park. The map makes note of a graveyard. There are other reasons to believe people are buried on campus.
During the expansion of this road in 1947, workers unearthed human bones and moved them a few hundred yards away. No one knows where. Again, in 1950, Workers creating a steam tunnel dug up human bones.
No one knows where those are either. We are going to attempt to image burials in this area, which is reported to be the site of an enslaved cemetery. So we're using ground penetrating radar. Our hope is to image the grave shafts, not really the burials or the remnants of the burials, but to be able to image the grave shafts.
This would be disturbed soil surrounded by native undisturbed soil. But the question remains, who were the people buried here? To answer that, we first have to go back to before the Civil War, to a time of slavery.
This land was once a plantation, owned by Benjamin W. Green. Few remnants remain, but the plantation house is still standing. I believe it was started in 1843 and that it...
was finished in 1844 or 45 as the improvements first appeared on the 1845 tax bill. The fact that the plantation house still stands is remarkable and perhaps a couple of outbuildings, one or two. I think it allows us to put meat on the bones of history, I think, because this is physical preservation.
We can say that we know that those enslaved people walked this area, perhaps walked the grounds of that particular homestead. And so, again, it's just another part of the humanities, archaeology and historic preservation. Historic preservation begins with the oral histories, not always the brick and mortar.
and from there we can branch outward. On the plantation, Benjamin Green built gristmills and sawmills powered with water from what is now the West Hampton Lake. Well, the lake is a beautiful lake and I would say with a critical examination perhaps of some engineering or laborious work by enslaved people, I think it allows us to look at it through perhaps a different lens. Perhaps now we can connect the beauty of that lake also with perhaps the pathos of knowing that people worked without being rewarded or remunerated.
for creating that wonderful lake. I'm sure there were slaves who built the lake. Whether they were green slaves or somebody else's slaves, I couldn't tell you.
In 1840, Green ran into some major financial difficulties and was charged with 24 felonies. He had a fair amount of loans outstanding with the bank, and the bank became concerned over his ability to repay. They took liens on all sorts of assets that he had. By 1860, Green's chief assets were the 186 enslaved people that he owned.
This is Green's census slave schedule from 1860. Only the age, sex, and color of the enslaved people are listed. No names. The significance of the fact that there are no names generally listed on slave censuses is that it takes away from the humanity of the individuals. It can be somewhat challenging at times to identify enslaved people who are listed on slave censuses, if you will. But through hard work, you can oftentimes match the sex and the age of that individual with lists, perhaps, that come from wills and tax lists for that individual.
It is believed that Green also rented out his enslaved people to other plantation owners. People were typically rented out for a year and oftentimes when you read the rental agreement, the person during the hiring, if you will, was required to give them a set of clothes, a set of shoes, and things of that nature. It's a very anxious time because you don't know where you're going, who you're going to, whether or not you will be assaulted, whether or not the work is done.
dangerous. For an example, there are people, particularly men, who were rented out for the mines. No one wanted to go down into the mines.
Mines aren't even safe today. So you can imagine what the mines were like back then. In 1935, Howard Harper Harlan a University of Virginia student, wrote a book titled, A Study in Human Ecology.
After the Civil War, freed African Americans mostly lived in Ziontown. He mentions bones of Ben Green slaves. We're not sure that they were Ben Green slaves, but oral tradition is how they probably came up with that. I believe they're African Americans, but whose bones, I have no idea.
I wouldn't be surprised if a graveyard for the enslaved was here on the property of the University of Richmond, because as people passed away, they usually allotted a slot of land for them to be properly buried. So that would not surprise me. There has been, I call it a tease almost, that it might not be entirely African Americans who were buried here, but I have not been able to substantiate that at all.
If not African Americans, then who might be buried on campus? One possibility? In late winter 1864, a Union cavalry raid led by 21-year-old Colonel Ulrich Dahlgren tried to reach Belle Isle to free Union prisoners. On a cold, rainy March night, Dahlgren and his troopers got as far as Green's house before they were turned back by Confederate troops. At the house, there were...
a bunch of wounded and dead horses in the yard. There were several dead Yankees and wounded Yankees that he left. There were three or four Confederates killed.
Every one of the Confederates had a hero's burial at Hollywood. The Yankees and the dead Yankees and horses, probably nobody knows where they went. They might have been down in part of the graveyard that you found on University of Richmond land.
If you've got a... several dead Yankees. I mean, what would you do?
You're not going to send them into Hollywood. You put the horses and the men in a hole and cover it up. It's important to undertake a project such as this by the University because it is an integral part of the humanities. When we study cultures that are different from ours, the history and the languages, I think it engenders a deeper amount of respect and perhaps empathy. It's important for transparency's sake.
Once you know about the history of a place, perhaps it allows you the ability to memorialize those folks who came before us. And again, learning about those people engenders a deeper sense of understanding, perhaps in hope and empathy, and those are all parts of the tenets of the humanities. So behind me, this is an image from a cemetery that we surveyed recently in Charlottesville.
The high amplitude signals are red and orange, and these rows of red and orange signals are graves. So this is imagery from the University of Richmond. We did a GPR survey in an area that is suspected to house graves.
What we had hoped to see is something similar to the previous image where we could see rows of burials. And in this case, the area that was thought to house the graves would be in here. This is a promontory, a ridge right here, that unfortunately we do not see any indications of graves in that area.
No graves are apparent in the GPR data we collected. Are there people buried on campus? And if so, who are they?
Those questions remain unanswered, and the stories of the enslaved people who once lived, toiled, and died here remain untold. The university community hopes to unearth the memory of those people. Thank you.