The Spirits of Charlottesville
A Hauntingly Good Walk Through Charlottesville's First Public Burial Ground
A cemetery is not really built for the dead. It's built by the living — and what a community chooses to carve in granite, and what it lets sink quietly into unmarked grass, tells you more about that community than almost anything else it leaves behind. Maplewood, established in 1827 as Charlottesville's first public cemetery, has been keeping that record for two centuries. This walking tour is your chance to finally read it.
Every stone here is a decision. Somebody decided Colonel John Bowie Strange deserved a monument so large it wasn't finished until fifty-four years after his death — while, a few feet away, more than a hundred soldiers who died of fever and infection in Charlottesville's wartime hospitals still lie in ground with no names attached to it at all. Somebody decided that Paul McIntire, a man who reshaped this entire city with his fortune, would rest under a stone so modest you could walk past it — while nearby, a small marker reading only "Hagar, Faithful Servant" records an enslaved woman's entire life in three words, placed inside the family plot of the people who owned her. Two very different kinds of erasure, sitting a few steps apart, and this tour walks you through what each one actually means.
Details
DATE COST LOCATION TIME FOOD and DRINK
To be determined by you
$30 PER PERSON
$15 Youth Under 18
Charlottesville, VA
Maplewood Cemetery
7:00 pm
Bring your own water.
No public restrooms on the route.
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The People Who Are Still Waiting to Be Met
You'll meet Letitia Shelby, whose 1777 grave — the oldest stone in the cemetery — may or may not hold the woman it names; her family moved her marker here half a century after her death, and nobody is entirely sure they moved anything else. You'll meet Louis Brown, who spent his life carving beautiful angels and clasped hands into other people's headstones, and was buried, in the end, beneath nothing at all. You'll meet Maud Coleman Woods, poised to become the nation's first Miss America before typhoid fever took her at twenty-four, and Job Foster, a traveling circus performer killed by his own act's elephant in 1851, buried far from wherever he actually called home.
And you'll meet a father and son who disagreed, in public, about how fast justice should come. Fairfax Taylor bought his family's freedom before the Civil War even began. His son, James T.S. Taylor, escaped Confederate lines to fight for the Union, corresponded directly with Lincoln, and helped rewrite Virginia's constitution in 1867. Fairfax's own grave was lost to weeds and neglect for generations — until, in February 2013, this community went looking for it, found it, and rededicated it in front of people who still remembered why it mattered.
That last story is really the whole tour in miniature: memory isn't fixed the moment someone dies. It's a decision the living keep making, over and over, for centuries — sometimes by building a monument, and sometimes by finally admitting one should have been built decades ago.
Why This Walk Gives You More Than History
Most people leave a cemetery tour with a few good stories. You'll leave this one with something sturdier: a genuine feel for how memory actually works — who gets a monument, who gets three words, who gets nothing, and how much of that has less to do with a life's true worth than with who happened to still be living, and in charge of the granite, afterward. Once you've walked past Hagar's stone and McIntire's modest one in the same few minutes, you start reading every graveyard, plaque, and statue you'll ever pass differently. That's not a small thing to carry home from an hour outdoors.
Reserve Your Spot
The stones here have been quietly keeping score for almost two hundred years — who was honored, who was hidden, and who this community eventually went back for. Come hear what they still have to say. Will you join us?
How long is this tour?
This is a 60-90 minute walking tour.
How far will we walk?
This tour is about .5 miles.
What if the weather turns?
This is an outdoor tour. Barring lightning, we will hold the tour as scheduled. You can reschedule if weather is a concern to you.
How historical is it, really?
We fact-check every story we tell and are always honest about what is documented versus legend. History is subjective at times. Although we strive to be as accurate as possible... some things are viewed through different lenses. This is history first — the atmosphere serves the truth, not the other way around.
