Danville, Virginia: Hallowed Ground

The town's Civil War cemeteries deepened Ernest Furguson's view of history as a young boy

  • By Ernest B. Furgurson
  • Photographs by Tyrone Turner
  • Smithsonian magazine, January 2011, Subscribe
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Danville Virginia Ernest Furgurson
The "cemeteries were park and playground," recalls Ernest B. Furgurson, in the National Cemetery. (Tyrone Turner)

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I grew up on Lee Street in Danville, Virginia, the last capital of the Confederacy, and I attended Lee Street Baptist Church and Robert E. Lee School, where I played the role of General Lee in our fifth-grade pageant much more convincingly than Martin Sheen did in the film Gettysburg.

Lee was the street of my boyhood, my paper route, my deepest roots. It was lined with glowing maples, and we seldom had to interrupt our ball games to let a streetcar pass. The house that my grandfather built in 1909 faced the juncture of two cemeteries. To the left ran the stone wall around the Danville National Cemetery, which everyone called the Yankee cemetery, because that’s where Union soldiers who died in the local tobacco warehouse prisons during the Civil War were buried. To the right was the white picket fence that enclosed Green Hill, where my parents, grandparents and some of my great-grandparents are buried, and soon enough I will be too.

For us, those cemeteries were park and playground; our parents had courted there; we knew every oak and cedar, dove and chipmunk. On a mound at the center of the Yankee cemetery was a 70-foot flagpole flying the 48-star Old Glory. Around it were black-painted cannon barrels set in concrete, and pyramids of cannonballs left over from the Civil War. Spread across the surrounding acres were more than 1,300 graves marked by government-issue headstones. Every Memorial Day, black citizens wearing patriotic sashes paraded there to hear music and speeches honoring the soldiers who had died to make them free. Yet within that cemetery, beside the back wall, a few dozen U.S. Colored Troops—free blacks and former slaves who had fought for the Union—were segregated in death as they had been in life. Later, when veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I were laid beside the Civil War dead, we kids, barefooted in season, stood at attention wherever we were as the neighborhood echoed the bugle notes of taps.

That stone wall around the National Cemetery marked the boundary between Yankee and Rebel territory more clearly than the Potomac River ever did. From the main gate of Green Hill, a road ran back to the Confederate Soldiers Monument, a granite obelisk on a mound surrounded by Virginia cedars. It was decorated with bronze bas-relief images of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and words chosen by the Ladies’ Memorial Association, which raised $2,000 to erect it in 1878: “Patriots!” it said. “Know that these fell in the effort to establish just government and perpetuate constitutional liberty. Who thus die will live in lofty example.” And on another side: “They died as men who nobly contend for the cause of truth and right. ‘They softly lie and sweetly sleep.’”

Scattered among the winding lanes were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Confederate veterans’ graves, including that of Pvt. Harry Wooding, honorarily promoted to Cap’n Harry after the War, who was mayor of Danville for 46 years. We boys stood reverently at the edge of the crowd at his funeral in 1938. Many of those veterans’ graves were marked with footstones bearing the initials CV (for Confederate Veteran); at one time such a stone marked the grave of my mother’s grandfather, Robert Daniel Ferguson, first sergeant of the Chatham Grays, Company I, 53rd Virginia Infantry. But through the years most of those markers were broken off and lost. I was told that my great-grandpa lay somewhere near the fence across from the church, but nobody knew exactly where.

Behind the National Cemetery was a third burial ground, set apart after the War for newly emancipated slaves. Nice folks called it the “colored cemetery.” I didn’t know then that its proper name was Freedman’s. In decades past, some black families had erected walls about plots there, with imposing gravestones. But these symbols of status had been effectively erased by municipal neglect. The stones stood in a nine-acre wasteland. The border between Freedman’s and Green Hill, though only two strands of barbed wire, was as distinct as the wall around the National Cemetery: on the west side, well-mowed lawn; on the east, tall weeds. We got cockleburs and sticktights on our socks when we passed through on our way to catch frogs and crawfish in Jackson Branch.

To get there, we crossed the main line of the Southern Railway, which ran from Washington to New Orleans, and the other way for Southerners hoping to find jobs during the Great Depression or respect during the long grim decades of segregation. Often when trains slowed approaching the station by the Dan River, hobos hopped off and spread through the neighborhood, asking for food. When a coal train eased down the grade, black men climbed on and threw off chunks to women alongside, who filled guano sacks to take home to heat their stoves on Liberty Hill.

Like Freedman’s Cemetery, Liberty Hill was populated first by newly emancipated slaves after the War. It was a poor ghetto of frame houses and shacks beyond Jackson Branch. You crossed the stream on a single wooden girder; if you grabbed the cable handrail alongside, you might get rusty metal splinters. This bridge led to a sweet spring, a two-inch pipe jutting out of the red clay hillside, that had provided water to Liberty Hill for generations. Beside the branch, in a hut of discarded signs and tar paper, lived Old Mary, who came to Slick Warren’s grocery store to scavenge unsold vegetables and carry them home in her sack. She said she wanted them to feed her pig, but we understood she was feeding herself, too. She wore what seemed the same long skirt, apron and ban­danna year-round, and leaned over to sift through the garbage at an acute angle that reminded me of slaves picking tobacco in pictures I had seen. We told ourselves that as a child, she had been a slave herself.


I grew up on Lee Street in Danville, Virginia, the last capital of the Confederacy, and I attended Lee Street Baptist Church and Robert E. Lee School, where I played the role of General Lee in our fifth-grade pageant much more convincingly than Martin Sheen did in the film Gettysburg.

Lee was the street of my boyhood, my paper route, my deepest roots. It was lined with glowing maples, and we seldom had to interrupt our ball games to let a streetcar pass. The house that my grandfather built in 1909 faced the juncture of two cemeteries. To the left ran the stone wall around the Danville National Cemetery, which everyone called the Yankee cemetery, because that’s where Union soldiers who died in the local tobacco warehouse prisons during the Civil War were buried. To the right was the white picket fence that enclosed Green Hill, where my parents, grandparents and some of my great-grandparents are buried, and soon enough I will be too.

For us, those cemeteries were park and playground; our parents had courted there; we knew every oak and cedar, dove and chipmunk. On a mound at the center of the Yankee cemetery was a 70-foot flagpole flying the 48-star Old Glory. Around it were black-painted cannon barrels set in concrete, and pyramids of cannonballs left over from the Civil War. Spread across the surrounding acres were more than 1,300 graves marked by government-issue headstones. Every Memorial Day, black citizens wearing patriotic sashes paraded there to hear music and speeches honoring the soldiers who had died to make them free. Yet within that cemetery, beside the back wall, a few dozen U.S. Colored Troops—free blacks and former slaves who had fought for the Union—were segregated in death as they had been in life. Later, when veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I were laid beside the Civil War dead, we kids, barefooted in season, stood at attention wherever we were as the neighborhood echoed the bugle notes of taps.

That stone wall around the National Cemetery marked the boundary between Yankee and Rebel territory more clearly than the Potomac River ever did. From the main gate of Green Hill, a road ran back to the Confederate Soldiers Monument, a granite obelisk on a mound surrounded by Virginia cedars. It was decorated with bronze bas-relief images of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and words chosen by the Ladies’ Memorial Association, which raised $2,000 to erect it in 1878: “Patriots!” it said. “Know that these fell in the effort to establish just government and perpetuate constitutional liberty. Who thus die will live in lofty example.” And on another side: “They died as men who nobly contend for the cause of truth and right. ‘They softly lie and sweetly sleep.’”

Scattered among the winding lanes were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Confederate veterans’ graves, including that of Pvt. Harry Wooding, honorarily promoted to Cap’n Harry after the War, who was mayor of Danville for 46 years. We boys stood reverently at the edge of the crowd at his funeral in 1938. Many of those veterans’ graves were marked with footstones bearing the initials CV (for Confederate Veteran); at one time such a stone marked the grave of my mother’s grandfather, Robert Daniel Ferguson, first sergeant of the Chatham Grays, Company I, 53rd Virginia Infantry. But through the years most of those markers were broken off and lost. I was told that my great-grandpa lay somewhere near the fence across from the church, but nobody knew exactly where.

Behind the National Cemetery was a third burial ground, set apart after the War for newly emancipated slaves. Nice folks called it the “colored cemetery.” I didn’t know then that its proper name was Freedman’s. In decades past, some black families had erected walls about plots there, with imposing gravestones. But these symbols of status had been effectively erased by municipal neglect. The stones stood in a nine-acre wasteland. The border between Freedman’s and Green Hill, though only two strands of barbed wire, was as distinct as the wall around the National Cemetery: on the west side, well-mowed lawn; on the east, tall weeds. We got cockleburs and sticktights on our socks when we passed through on our way to catch frogs and crawfish in Jackson Branch.

To get there, we crossed the main line of the Southern Railway, which ran from Washington to New Orleans, and the other way for Southerners hoping to find jobs during the Great Depression or respect during the long grim decades of segregation. Often when trains slowed approaching the station by the Dan River, hobos hopped off and spread through the neighborhood, asking for food. When a coal train eased down the grade, black men climbed on and threw off chunks to women alongside, who filled guano sacks to take home to heat their stoves on Liberty Hill.

Like Freedman’s Cemetery, Liberty Hill was populated first by newly emancipated slaves after the War. It was a poor ghetto of frame houses and shacks beyond Jackson Branch. You crossed the stream on a single wooden girder; if you grabbed the cable handrail alongside, you might get rusty metal splinters. This bridge led to a sweet spring, a two-inch pipe jutting out of the red clay hillside, that had provided water to Liberty Hill for generations. Beside the branch, in a hut of discarded signs and tar paper, lived Old Mary, who came to Slick Warren’s grocery store to scavenge unsold vegetables and carry them home in her sack. She said she wanted them to feed her pig, but we understood she was feeding herself, too. She wore what seemed the same long skirt, apron and ban­danna year-round, and leaned over to sift through the garbage at an acute angle that reminded me of slaves picking tobacco in pictures I had seen. We told ourselves that as a child, she had been a slave herself.

It’s hard to explain how close 1865 was to us, how reminders of that war still surrounded us, so long after Appomattox. Danville was not Richmond, whose obsession and main topic of conversation was its vanished glory. It was not girded by battlefields, had not burned when the Yankees came. True, Jeff Davis stayed in Danville for a week after fleeing Richmond that April, making it the last capital of the Confederacy and the mansion where his cabinet met the last capitol. But when Union regiments arrived two weeks later, the mayor surrendered the town calmly, and when the soldiers left, the town fathers thanked them for behaving so politely.

Possibly in some other place, after some other war, all that would have faded away. But there we were at Robert E. Lee School two generations later, singing the songs of Stephen Foster—“Beautiful Dreamer,” “Old Black Joe,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”—as if waiting for the Chatham Grays and the Danville Artillery to come home. There we were, studying a fifth-grade Virginia history book that chose Thomas Nelson Page, son of a Confederate major, to tell us how he saw the old plantations.

“I believe it was the purest and sweetest life ever lived,” the textbook quoted him as saying. “It gave the most to make this great nation....This same social life brought Christ to the Negroes in less than two hundred years and a civilization which they had not known since the dawn of history. It made men noble, gentle, and brave and women tender and true.”

Yes, we were brainwashed, but I don’t think any of us were persuaded that slavery had been a paradise. We could see its legacy in the lives of the black people around us—see it, if not, at that age, fully comprehend it. What sank into me was not so much what I was taught in history class as what I unconsciously absorbed from the ground I walked on, from the long rows of mute stone testimony to the deaths of so many, and from the sad voices of old ladies whose fathers had been in the War. It was there before I went out into the world, and eventually it compelled me to write about that war—not just the generals and battles, but the hospitals and cemeteries, the widows and lonesome children. When I go back to Danville and Lee Street, in person or in my mind, I understand myself better, with all my guilts and complexes. That quarter-mile square of my barefoot days, its tangible reminders of soldiers and slaves, rights and wrongs, playmates and ancestors, life and especially death, has somehow affected everything I’ve thought and written.

Things have changed, of course. What were broad aisles between the original graves in the National Cemetery are now filled with veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. A grand magnolia tree that wasn’t there when I was young has grown up and displaced the headstones of three soldiers from Ohio, Indiana and Wiscon­sin—Yankees now as deeply rooted in Virginia as I am. The white pickets around Green Hill have become a chain-link fence; scattered gravestones there have been overturned by vandals. The Daniel house at 738 Lee, where my maternal great-grandmother sat on the porch waiting to join her soldier husband across the street, has been torn down. I have found the plot where the two of them are buried, and marked it with a government tombstone like those that identify the Union soldiers a few hundred yards away. Danville has had three black mayors; the barbed wire between Green Hill and Freedman’s cemeteries is gone; and the grass is mowed on both sides. Lee Street Baptist Church is now Mount Sinai Glorious. Liberty Hill has city water, paved streets and middle-class housing.

Changed indeed. I doubt that the town’s younger generations could understand what it was like for us so long ago, the feeling that we somehow shared the glories and the lost causes of those on both sides of that stone wall. Too much more history has happened since. Yet even from this distance, I still hear the echo of taps.

Ernest B. “Pat” Furgurson’s most recent Civil War book is Freedom Rising.


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There is a new web site about Lee Street in Danville, Virginia. Apparently the site was started after they saw this site's article by Mr. Furgurson. RG

Posted by Ronnie G. on September 22,2012 | 07:36 PM

Hey Pat, I loved your article on the National Cemetery on Lee Street, it brought back a lot of memories. I grew up living there, along with my two brothers, Harry, Jr., and Frank Williamson, both of whom knew you--and you them. I was too young for you to remember me, Glen, but I knew--and liked Roger, and Carl, Jr., Buster Brown, Bobby Plott, et al., Jimmy Gravely is still kicking, the last I heard. Lee Street was divided down the middle, the Furgusons/Browns on one side and the Williamsons and the Davises on the other. {;-)) It was nice to hear from Linda Sue Traylor Page, she is absolutely right about Lee Street. I was looking at a Google Earth map the other day trying to put family names to the remaining houses, it made me sick. Pat, thanks for putting the old neighborhood on the map... glen

Posted by Glen A. Williamson on September 3,2012 | 02:39 AM

I enjoyed your article very much and took it with me yesterday when I went to Danville to see and explore Freedman's Cemetery. (The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities asked me to write a 250-word item on the cemetery but I am finding little information on it.)I have been working intermittently over the years conducting oral histories and collecting documents related to the African American history of Danville (particularly the 1963 civil rights demonstrations), and the Freedman's Cemetery assignment is an extension of that work. Would you be willing to talk to me about Freedman's Cemetery--or e-mail me with sources I might pursue? Here is a link to a website I developed with oral history excerpts and documents related to the African American history of Danville: www.vcdh.virginia.edu/cslk/danville/
My e-mail address is ee9b@virginia.edu.Thank you so much! Emma Edmunds

Posted by Emma Edmunds on October 23,2011 | 10:01 AM

I grew up with my parents and sister at 743 Holbrook Avenue and recall going to Lee Street Baptist Church as a young child. I was not allowed to go to the Danville National Cemetery as it was not deemed safe. Instead, I spent all of my young, formative years buried in the children's room at the Danville library, located in the former Sutherlin Mansion. That time established my love of libraries and I devote a lot of time to the Friends of the Phoenix Public Library.In the summers I, too, went to Luna Lake and was friends with Lynn Sanders, daughter of the LL owners. I attended Robert E. Lee School and recall being in awe of the "mansions" scattered along upper Holbrook Ave. and on its side streets. My family still lives in Danville and I visit at least once a year.

Posted by Wilma Kendrick Mathews on May 31,2011 | 07:27 PM

I'm looking for any information on Marie Comer (-Price?). I believe she was a Danville school teacher. I am unsure of the years, but from the comments I've read, some of you may have information on her. I would guess anywhere from the 1940s or even before.

Any help would be most appreciated. Thank you.

Posted by LaVette Herbert on April 2,2011 | 03:03 PM

I was born in Danville in 1947 and lived there until 1960, when my family moved to California. My friend, Danny Worley lived in the house directly behind Lee Street Baptist Church.
I attended Robert E. Lee Jr. High and played often at Green Street Park....went with my sister to Luna Lake in the summer....spent many Saturdays at the Lea theater downtown watching cowboy heroes and beloved war movies....I remember going to see drive-in movies with my parents....I remember going to the fair every year...what fun....
Danville has stayed in my heart all my life....like a great love that I lost and still mourn....

Posted by David Dockery on March 24,2011 | 02:32 PM

I was born 8/3/1944 just outside Reidsville, NC, in a log cabin surrounded by a tabacco field assisted by a black midwife no less. My Mother told me I cost 8 dollars for 2 visits from a Dr. As an infant we moved to Danville. There thru when I graduated George Washington HS in 1962, we moved several times. I remember sharecropping tabacco near White Oak Mtn. Another was a modest city owned rental house bordering the Danville Municipal Airport ($6 a week). Also several places around the Schoolfield area where my Dad and most family members worked. I see where you attended Robert E. Lee school. I also attended that school years 1957 and 1958. I bet you remember the History teacher there, she really loved the Civil War part. It was then a Junior HS. As a Danvillian, I too have scoured and walked many of the streets of Danville, North Danville, South Danville, Schoolfield, etc. I know and remember many aspects of what kind a town Danville was. My rememberance was that of a poor white boy trying to get out of the poverty associated with working at the Mill. I too worked in the Mill in the finishing dept. in Schoolfield for a few months after HS. It didn't take long for me to see what was awaiting me if I stayed there. I couldn't find another job so I was rescued by joining the USAF in Jan. 1963. That was the last I lived there. I will attempt to read more of your work. If you should like some material on what it was like for me in Danville during 1944 to 1962, I would be glad to talk to you. I find it very interesting now, much more so than when I was growong up there.

Posted by Bobby G. on February 17,2011 | 06:26 AM

To my remote relative Kathy Turner and several other old Danvillians who have posted comments:

I'd like to contact you but don't know how. If you'll post your email address or write me in Washington, I'll try to get back to you.

--Pat Furgurson

Posted by Pat Furgurson on February 8,2011 | 02:40 PM

My dad Joseph Wilbur Skinnell worked for Southern Railway for many years as did most of his family. Although we lived in Charlotte, N.C., I spent a great deal of time visiting relatives in Danville. I was born in 1941, so my memory is a little vague, but I do remember my uncle on my mother's side, Claude S Adams was married to Maude Furgurson who passed before i was born. My mother Gladys Adams Skinnell is buried at Green Hill cemetery and my dad at Mountain View. At my dad's funeral, i remember two very nice gentlemen coming to the cemetery and talking with us. I beleive one of them was called Pat and i think he said he played baseball with my dad. If you are in any way familiar with any of my family, i would certainly appreciate hearing from you. I know so little about my mother's family and would appreciate any information i could get. Thank you so much. I intend to purchase your book and know i will enjoy it. Regards, Kathy Wilson

Posted by Kathryn Skinnell Wilson on February 6,2011 | 10:41 AM

I also grew up in Danville. I attended Lee Street Baptist church from my birth in 1936 until 1954 when I married and moved away. I remember many walks in the cemetry with daddy. We loved making up stories about the people that had died. The library was my "home away from home". I read every book in the children's section and could hardly wait to be able to go upstairs to read those books. Today one of my favorite hobbies is reading. I also travel a great deal as I want to actually see all the places I have read about. My goal is to visit 100 countries and I have almost done it.I played at Green Street Park, attended John L. Berkley and GW. It was a great time. We could go out all day and our parent's did not have to worry about us. My mother and aunt were friends with Patsy Furguson and enjoyed the articles that Pat wrote. I will go to my local library today and look up books by Ernest Furguson.

Posted by Dorothy Jeffries Cooper on February 5,2011 | 12:39 PM

East Stokes Street, Paxton Street, Jefferson Street, Riverside Drive, Chatham Avenue and Lee Street brings many memories. My family (Huff) joined Lee Street Baptist Church and was baptized in 1958. Our family was very active in most all activities, music,teaching and missions. Rev. B. B. Isley was the pastor, married one of my sisters in 1960. Later, Rev. Benjamin Berry (my sister married his son, 1970), and married me in 1977. I do remember 1960's well. I did attend the 1965 Centennial Parade in Danville. My sisters and I graduated from George Washington High School and Robert E. Lee. Our parents are both buried in Danville Memorial Gardens. We walked the beautiful historical streets, went to the Library, shopping downtown, movie theater, Belk's, Thalhimers, Pharmacy (my aunt worked their for years), Rippe's, watched many parade's, picnic's at Ballou Park, driving up and down Riverside Drive through Kelly's Hamburger, Coca Cola Dances, Dairy Queen (Yum), Mary's Diner, Skatig Rink with Earnie Paul playing the organ as we skated, Drive-in theaters and resturants, the Fair, Dan River, could go on and on. My father worked for Dan River Mills downtown until it was torn down (Sheet Metal Division). He later became Security Guard at Schoolfield Division. It was hard seeing our history being disolved. But, we definitely had many great memories. My Aunt's family attended Mosley Methodist Church and her husband's family lived on Lee Street, the Motley's. Can't go without saying how much fun it was sleigh riding down East Stokes Street.

Posted by Frances Huff Barr on January 30,2011 | 10:41 PM

I recently read Mr. Furgurson's book on the battle of Cold Harbor. It's terrific.

Posted by colin woodward on January 27,2011 | 09:23 AM

I grew up in the fiftys and sixtys when the Sutherlin Mansion was our library. I loved that place. I remember going to the cemeteries there as a child with my Dad. It was such a beautiful place with all those old tombstones so full of history.

I hope Danville comes to realize the value of the history that will be lost in those old neighborhoods.

Posted by Deborah Myers Lunsford on January 18,2011 | 02:05 PM

I grew up in Danville and graduated from GW in 1958 long before integration. My parents and grandparents are buried on Lee St in Green Hill, along with about 100 Yankee POWs and soldiers from all our wars. It was certainly a segregated community with lots of history....The Sutherlin Mansion, which became the last Capitol (or one of them, as it moved further S to Greensboro and Charlotte before the final surrender) was our public library with a children's section downstairs. I spent many hours reading children's books down there which wouldn't be allowed today because of their racist tones. (My favorite character was Nicodemus, a little black boy).
It was strange to read the postings of many folks who I used to know and haven't thought of for many years.
Great article by Pat.
Jonathan Yardley, who was in my class at UNC, and used to be the book editor for the Washington Post was the son of the headmaster of Chatham Hall (...a girls school about 15 miles from Danville. Those Chatham Grays came from there too. If I'm not mistaken, Chatham was the county seat of Pittsylvania County.

Posted by Hal Kushner MD on January 9,2011 | 12:48 PM




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