Letters: Readers respond to recent cemetery update

Dear Editor:

The recent article “Enrichmond hires group to begin cemetery preservation plan” reports on statements from a recent Enrichmond press release. There appears to be little or no additional reporting. The Citizen could have tapped into its own stories from past years about Evergreen and East End Cemeteries. Better, it could have contacted a member of the Friends of East End, to which it refers in the article.

Enrichmond’s announcement that it has engaged a company to create a preservation plan is curious and troublingly belated. For years, the Friends of East End—the all-volunteer organization that led the reclamation of that burial ground, beginning in 2013—and other concerned citizens have called for a preservation plan at Evergreen and East End Cemeteries, which the state of Virginia helped Enrichmond acquire with public funds. Enrichmond has owned Evergreen since spring 2017 and East End since spring 2019. Why is it only now commissioning a preservation plan?

More alarmingly, Enrichmond invested in another kind of plan for Evergreen, one that had input from Enrichmond’s advisory board, which includes descendants. Unfortunately, it’s an engineering plan, prepared by an engineering firm, not a preservation document.

Enrichmond’s $18.6 million “master plan,” released almost a year ago, calls for new construction at this fragile, historic burial ground, in addition to extensive “branding.” It calls for water, sewage, and cable to be installed at the cemetery. This means digging trenches in a burial ground with thousands of unmarked graves. With no archaeological support attached to the plan—and zero dollars beyond staff salaries allocated to marking and mapping the locations of graves—this is a recipe for desecration. Enrichmond has commissioned two more such plans, for East End and for Colored Paupers Cemetery, which it doesn’t even own.

The story asserts that the Friends “opted to cease its involvement at that site after it was unable to reach an agreement with Enrichmond. Each side faulted the other for the contentious end to the relationship.” This is misleading. Our relationship soured long ago, for reasons that would require too much space to explain here. We suspended on-site operations at East End because in May 2020 Enrichmond insisted that we sign an exploitative new volunteer agreement, despite having promised us unrestricted access to the cemetery. Not only did Enrichmond renege on that promise, but it attempted to lay claim to our intellectual property, as well as our likenesses. Months of negotiation, which we believe Enrichmond did not pursue in good faith, failed.

As individuals, we continue to visit the cemetery regularly, and we can say with certainty that very little work—aside from what we do ourselves—is taking place at East End. We also continue to document the site and the community laid to rest there, on our own and with our partners in the East End Cemetery Collaboratory, professors at UR and VCU. Collaboratory members have also refused to sign the volunteer agreement that Enrichmond sought to impose.

Finally, we note that the photo that accompanies the story was shot during one of the hundreds of volunteer days hosted by the Friends of East End, not Enrichmond. This was a poor choice for a story about an organization that has shown contempt for us and for genuine community engagement.

Respectfully,
Erin Hollaway Palmer and Brian Palmer

Editor's note: The Citizen's publication of the article referenced was intended to serve as a brief update about Enrichmond's future plans for the cemeteries and not as an extensive attempt to describe or address the differences that exist between Friends of East End Cemeteries and Enrichmond.