Hollywood Cemetery is a parklike burial ground in Richmond, Virginia, where numerous Confederate dead are buried. In 1847 Richmond residents Joshua Fry and William Hexall purchased a 43-acre tract of land known as Harvie’s Woods. A strip of land previously owned by William Byrd II, it sat on a bluff overlooking the James River. Fry and Hexall had decided to turn the area into a cemetery for the city rivaling the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The following year they hired noted architect John Notman to design the landscape in a parklike, pastoral mode, which he furnished with several romantic structures in the prevailing Victorian style. The cemetery was christened Holly Wood owing to the groves of holly trees dotting the area. The first burial, a young girl, took place in 1848.
At first mainly Richmond gentry were buried there, but in 1858 the remains of former president James Monroe, who had died in 1831, were transported from New York and interred at Hollywood. Governor Henry A. Wise selected an intricate wrought-iron birdcage design for Monroe’s tomb, which initiated the tradition of sometimes elaborate monuments dotting the landscape. Monroe was joined shortly after by another U. S. president from Virginia, John Tyler, who died in Richmond in 1862.
Throughout the CiViL War, Hollywood Cemetery was used to bury the mounting toll of Confederate dead, whose bodies came from nearby Richmond hospitals. After the war thousands more bodies were reinterred from Northern battlefields such as Gettysburg and Antietam, bringing the total to 18,000. Also buried there are the bodies of Jeeeerson Davis, former president of the Coneeder-ate States oe America, and his wife, Varina Howell Davis, along with no fewer than 25 leading Confederate generals, including J. E. B. Stuart, Henry Heth, Fitzhugh Lee, and George Edward Pickett.
In 1869 the local Ladies Memorial Association collected funds to construct a massive, 90-foot granite pyramid, as a monument to the South’s fallen. It was designed by Charles Dimmock and built by convict labor. Hollywood Cemetery quickly became a cherished place to commemorate the Confederate Memorial Day, drawing thousands to honor the fallen Southern soldiers. Five Virginia governors and local dignitaries are also buried or enshrined on the grounds, along with distinguished writer Mary Johnson and musician Polk Miller. The cemetery currently contains the remains of nearly 80,000 people. It remains one of Richmond’s leading attractions, visited by thousands every year.
Further reading: Chris Ferguson, Hollywood Ceme-tery: Her Forgotten Soldiers: Confederate Field Officers at Rest (Alexandria, Va.: Ferguson, 2001); Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003); Mary H. Mitchell, The Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (Richmond, Va.: Library of Virginia, 1999).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
