The two adjoining cemeteries composed one of the largest African-American-controlled cemetery groupings in the South. Its grounds were bisected by a ravine and featured formal paths and sections along both sides. That year, the re-formed association was able to buy back the eastern half of its original tract containing six acres, and by 1917 it had expanded “East End Cemetery” to sixteen total acres. One year following the purchase, in 1896, the Greenwood association was forced to return the property to the seller, who then sold the western half of the acreage to the city of Richmond to be used as an additional “ Colored Paupers Cemetery.” Core members of Greenwood rallied again in 1897 with new leadership and a new name–the East End Memorial Burial Association. Shortly after the opening of Evergreen, another African-American organization, the Greenwood Memorial Association of Virginia, purchased twelve acres of land along Evergreen Cemetery’s northern border. The initial forty-seven acre purchase was soon expanded to fifty-nine acres under a reorganized Evergreen Cemetery Association in the early twentieth century. The cemetery features a geometrical layout with a few curving lanes up the hilly terrain. Evergreen’s African-American founders intended it to be one of the region’s premier burial grounds for black residents during the height of Jim Crow segregation.
Evergreen is located on the east end of town, on East Richmond Road across Stony Run Creek from the city’s Oakwood Cemetery. Evergreen Cemetery was founded by the Evergreen Cemetery Company in 1891, around the time that the venerable Barton Heights Cemeteries were nearing capacity and facing pressure to close.
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