Charles Craven Lynched, 31 July 1902
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Leesburg Potter’s Field – Established 1839 – Reburials 1983 & 2022
In 1839 the Town of Leesburg acquired from Benjamin Shreve Sr. a half-acre tract of land on the turnpike just east of the town limits. Its purpose was to serve as a public cemetery for indigent citizens. The town’s more prosperous residents were usually buried in church cemeteries. As both…
Lynching in America / The Lynching of Robert Clark
On June 13, 1891, a mob of white people brutally lynched a 20-year-old Black man named Robert Clark, in a wooded area in Bristol, Virginia, known as Lindsey’s Grove believed to be a quarter mile south of here. The mob, numbering as many as 3,000 people, hanged Mr. Clark from…
City Jail: A Site of Racial Terror in Alexandria. Lynching of Benjamin Thomas, 1899
A “Public Prison” for the Enslaved. Long before a lynch mob abducted Benjamin Thomas from the Alexandria jail, this site was one of racial oppression, particularly due to its connection to slavery. Within a decade of Congress authorizing $10,000 to build this jail, the American Anti-Slavery Society featured it in…
Leonard Woods Lynched
Leonard Woods, a black coal miner from Jenkins, KY, was lynched near here on the night of 29-30 Nov. 1927. Officers had arrested Woods for allegedly killing Herschel Deaton, a white man from Coeburn, VA, and had taken him to the Whitesburg, KY jail. On the day of Deaton’s funeral,…
The Lynching of Raymond Byrd
On the night of August 15, 1926, a mob of rowdy Wythe County citizens forced their way into the Wythe County jail that stood on this site until 1928. Overpowering the county jailer, the mob breached the cell in which a black man, Raymond Arthur Byrd, was incarcerated. The mob…