Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries by Ryan K. Smith Lynn Rainville (bio) Ryan K. Smith Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020 328 pages, 52 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9781421439273, $34.95 HB Not everyone's daily perambulations include a walk by or through a cemetery, but after reading Ryan K. Smith's book you might change your habits. In his latest book, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries, Smith sets out an ambitious goal: to survey three hundred years of urban history by reviewing the concomitant changes to a city's burial grounds. This approach allows him to survey local community ideas about and attitudes toward Native Americans, enslaved and free African Americans, elite and poor Whites, as well as Christian and Jewish communities. By keeping his focus on one southern city—Richmond, Virginia—he is able to survey the diversity of mortuary traditions within that locale throughout numerous eras. As he insightfully observes, "The realm of the dead played an active part in all stages of the city's growth, providing a parallel history still capable of surprise" (10). Smith charts out a second and very timely goal: to explore the individuals (many of whom are recent transplants to the city) who have dedicated countless hours to preserving these sites and/or fighting to protect them. His interviews with these individuals are an important component of his research and this book. Smith's book is a welcome addition to the somewhat crowded field of cemetery studies. Most manuscripts focus upon either one burial ground in great detail or a specific type of cemetery, such as urban cemeteries influenced by the Rural Cemetery Movement, over time. While both approaches have their advantages, each are often too specialized for wider audiences. It is less common to find a scholar who is willing to research the burial grounds used by different ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups, while also covering a broad timeframe. In order to cover this wide range of topics, Smith organized his manuscript into eight chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue. The introduction connects the historic research to the function and importance of these sites in the present. In his first chapter, "The Churchyard," Smith integrates biographical examples from specific individuals into broader trends within Virginian history. By tracing specific deaths, such as the demise and burial of Parson Robert Rose (1703–1751), Smith provides a concrete example of how a person's identity and status in life dictates their burial options. In the next chapter, "The African Burial Ground," he traces the scant historic evidence for early African and African American burials and integrates them alongside the archaeological, topographical, and legal documentation. The accompanying figures and maps for this chapter are excellent and help the reader see that the sacred burial spaces for Black Americans are now hidden under modern highways and buildings. This chapter also provides an important overview of the preservation battles that have surrounded historic African American burial grounds in Richmond and provides a necessary context for the elite burials in nearby Shockoe Hill Cemetery (surrounded by sites such as the poorhouse and a Jewish burial ground). Chapter 3, "The New Burying Ground," discusses that cemetery in Shockoe Hill—originally for Whites only—which contains the bodies of Richmond's most prominent families, including governors, Revolutionary War heroes, congressmen, and professionals including ministers, physicians, businessmen, and lawyers. The multicentury trajectory of burials at this site enables Smith to track the evolution of mortuary traditions, the design of cemetery landscapes, and the function of these grounds to display and interpret the gradual desegregation of this formerly White [End Page 126] cemetery, and he also weaves individual biographies into larger historic narratives in a compelling fashion. As with most of the chapters in this book, the author discusses contemporary efforts to protect this site, including the formation in 2007 of the Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery, which cares for the site. This cemetery has an interesting challenge in the present: to reconcile "its position as 'a white aristocratic burial ground' set within a...