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Saving Belmont's Burial Ground for the Enslaved
Saving Belmont's Burial Ground for the Enslaved
By Laura Longley
Just east of Leesburg near the crossroads of busy Route 7 and Belmont Ridge Parkway are two cemeteries. One occupies a prominent place near an imposing Federal mansion, built in 1799, which now serves as the Manor House of Belmont Country Club. Enclosed within its brick walls is the grave of the home’s first owner, Ludwell Lee, whose father, Richard Henry Lee, signed the Declaration of Independence.
Farther afield, in a woodland on the remote, northernmost edge of the original, 400-acre Lee plantation, is the second cemetery. Here on 2.75 acres are the graves of 44 enslaved persons, representing but a few of the African Americans owned by the Lee family in the period before the Civil War. The 1810 census, for example, shows they owned 69 individuals.
This cemetery for the enslaved lay untended for decades after 1865, even though its existence had been recorded by the county in the 1850s. Indeed, it had gone unnoticed until 2015 when Michelle Thomas, an electrical engineer with a calling to preach and in search of a site for her new, nondenominational church, stumbled upon the small overgrown parcel.
The owner, Toll Brothers, was preparing to develop the entire property into a gated golf community. Protecting the burial ground meant acquiring it, Thomas realized.
Anyone who has ever met Pastor Michelle Thomas knows that nothing will stand in her way. Just dealing with the county would mean navigating the planning and development departments and convincing the county attorney, historic preservationists, the Loudoun Heritage Commission, and the Board of Supervisors that hers was the right course of action.
There also was the small matter of who would take ownership and responsibility for the cemetery. Fortunately, by 2017, Pastor Michelle had launched the Loudoun Freedom Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to African American heritage that could serve as the cemetery’s trustee.
Once the transaction was finalized and the burial ground rededicated, the Loudoun Freedom Center was ready to move forward with plans for walking paths and educational programs.
Then the unimaginable happened. On a lovely spring day in June 2020, Michelle Thomas’s middle child, 16-year-old Fitz Alexander Campbell Thomas, drowned while swimming in Goose Creek near the Potomac River. Pastor Michelle decided to lay him to rest in the Belmont burial grounds that had been entrusted to her Freedom Center. Fitz, she said, would be “the first African American person who was born free to be buried in this cemetery.”
He won’t be the last. In the process of obtaining permission from the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to restore those hallowed grounds to active use, she and her husband arranged to be buried there as well, beside their son.
Around the same time Thomas began exploring the transfer of the Belmont burial ground to the Loudoun Freedom Center, another African American cemetery came to her attention. Located near Leesburg Executive Airport, the historic Sycolin Community Cemetery had been uncovered on a lunch-hour walk by historian Jim Koenig.
Koenig alerted Thomas to the cemetery’s existence. Because the town had purchased the land with federal grant funding, FAA approval was needed, complicating what seemed like a simple transaction. Ultimately, it took Thomas four years to complete the transfer.
Visions for both historic cemeteries began taking shape in the summer of ’21 when two Virginia Tech students in the university’s landscape architecture program dedicated themselves to the creation of master plans.
The students, Jacob Morris and Megan Lester, presented their concepts to Thomas and representatives of Loudoun County, the Town of Leesburg, and Toll Brothers in a virtual presentation to enthusiastic approval. The plans for both cemeteries incorporate scatter gardens for spreading cremains, columbaria, or cremation walls, and space for new burials.
