Introduction
Located in northeast Harrisonburg within the neighborhood of Newtown is the Newtown Cemetery. Since 1869, the Newtown Cemetery has served the African American community of Harrisonburg as the final resting place for many. Maintained by a dedicated organization of locals, the Newtown Cemetery hosts a vast array of well-preserved graves. The cemetery is the last resting place for a number of notable people from Harrisonburg including educators, politicians, and even important historical figures like Lucy Simms. This was one of the primary reasons why we chose this site, for both its historical significance and well-maintained state. There is a wealth of information historians can access by examining sites like these. Unfortunately, many historically African American cemeteries have fallen into disrepair in recent years due to neglect, coercion from white majority populations, and in some cases outright theft of bodies. Newtown Cemetery’s well-maintained state allows historians to examine how African American cemeteries can serve the community when they are left undisturbed.
In creating this project, we also sought to research the surrounding neighborhood of Newtown and its relationship with the cemetery. In researching the history of the surrounding area and the people who lived there, we learned more about Newtown Cemetery itself. The cemetery is intrinsically linked with the Newtown community; one cannot conduct any significant research on it without understanding the environment it’s a part of. One of our main challenges in conducting this project came in the form of research. While we were initially confident in our ability to find significant data about our subjects but soon hit a roadblock when it came to more concrete data about our subject’s personal lives. We believed that we would be able to find more information using the Heritage Quest database and genealogy lab, but we were unable to come up with anything significant.
Therefore, the majority of our sources did not come from conventional resources like census data or birth certificates, rather they came in the form of interviews, registrars of historical places, and newspaper articles. In creating our digital tour, we sought to make it as thorough and accessible as possible. There are three main photos in the tour each giving a different view of the cemetery. Within each picture there are five annotations with information about the cemetery, there are also links to close-up pictures of any grave or landmark that we refer to throughout the tour. We hope that in doing this we make the tour more digestible and understandable, without appearing too cluttered.
The goal of this project is to shine a light on a part of the local history of Harrisonburg that often gets overshadowed by the city’s focus on the Civil War and other more conventionally sensational topics. Creating the tour of Newtown Cemetery was an incredible experience, one that we believe can benefit the field of local history as a whole. We hope that in highlighting the story of the cemetery and the people buried there, we help bring more attention to an incredibly important part of Harrisonburg’s history.
Digital Tour
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Karen Thomas and the Northeast Neighborhood Association for giving us permission to do this project.
Sources:
Rockingham County World War I Memorial Historical Marker (hmdb.org)
Memorials in Newtown Cemetery – Find a Grave
https://www.harrisonburg.org/Dallard-Newman/
https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/scoh-simms/2018/04/27/elon-rhodes/
http://nenava.org/history.html
https://omeka.lib.jmu.edu/simms/items/show/1664
Executive Order 9981: Desegregation of the Armed Forces (1948) | National Archives
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85026941/1916-04-28/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1770&index=3&date2=1963&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&words=cemetery+colored+Harrisonburg+HARRISONBURG&proxdistance=5&state=Virginia&rows=20&ortext=Harrisonburg+&proxtext=&phrasetext=colored+Cemetery+&andtext=&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84025841/1930-03-15/ed-1/seq-8/#date1=1927&index=0&rows=20&words=cemetery+New+Town&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1946&proxtext=New+Town+Cemetery+&y=20&x=21&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/562e4807-1485-4c9f-b0a1-d7544aff2a5d/
https://omeka.lib.jmu.edu/simms/celebrating-simms-exhibit