Uncovering Woodberry Cemetery

By Hannah Wever
Review Staff Writer
Published: April 10, 2008

Nearby, well-known Maplewood Cemetery is a well-kept cemetery where an American flag waves boldly over rows of neatly maintained graves arranged between ornate ironwork and stones. But just a short drive away, at Woodberry Cemetery, the deceased are laid to rest in far more modest setting.
There’s no less love, reverence, honor or respect for those buried at Woodberry. And there are veterans buried there too, the same as at Maplewood. At Woodberry, there are simply not enough resources, but the Woodberry Cemetery Association has plans to change that.
In the town of Gordonsville’s periphery, just beyond the town limits and down a discreet, unpaved, and unmarked drive, there are five acres full of history at Woodberry Cemetery. But over the decades, the chore of preserving and cleaning the area has become greater than the number of people willing or able to do it. And with only a few well-meaning volunteers to perform maintenance chores, and no funds for a full-time caretaker, it doesn’t take long for vines and weeds to overtake the site, obscuring grave markers, and blocking the lanes and boundaries.
Unlike Maplewood Cemetery, the town doesn’t own Woodberry; nor does any county or state agency, or any private foundation. Instead, it is up to the community and the family members of those buried there to tend the graves, trim the overhead branches and keep the grass from going to seed.
In the last decade, there’s been a renewed effort to keep the burial place in order.
“It had been in disarray, but not because people didn’t try,” Gloria Gilmore, secretary and treasurer of the Woodberry Cemetery Association said. Some families whose loved ones were interred at Woodberry no longer live in the area. Some folks’ families simply don’t have the resources to buy a permanent grave marker for their loved ones, or to replace one that had been destroyed by time and the elements. All that remains to identify some areas as gravesites is a shallow depression in the earth.
“It doesn’t take long for Mother Earth to overpower you and take it back,” Gilmore said.
Strategic planning on the part of the cemetery association, and help from a state legislator led to a massive clean-up effort in the 1990s. Enormous bulldozers and earth moving machines came in and cleared the land, exposing long-hidden family plots, gravesites and memorials which nobody had tended for years. But when the heavy work was done, another problem surfaced: in some cases there were markers without graves and graves without markers, and precious few records existed to straighten everything out.
Before the clean-up, cemetery association director Doretha Dickerson said, “It was one of the saddest places you could ever go.” The neglect and disrepair of loved ones’ resting places was heart-breaking to see. “The sticker bushes would tear your stockings to shreds,” she added. Dickerson’s husband spent long hours trimming back the overgrowth, but within months, the bushes and plants returned.
The oldest visible graves at Woodberry suggest the land has been used as a graveyard since the 1860s. But it’s hard to know for sure, and that’s something the association hopes to find out, according to Gilmore. The association will have to become detectives, studying what little information is available to try to determine which community members were laid to rest—without a marker—at Woodberry in the last 100 years.
Unfortunately, research, archiving and cemetery administration are sciences, and in many respects, the work that needs to be done is beyond the scope of association members. There are a few clues from obituaries, church records and funeral homes, but the task of cataloging all the information—as daunting as it is—can’t even begin to tell the cemetery’s complete history. And there’s even less to go on to determine precisely where folks were interred.
“We don’t even know who was doing things there before the 1880s,” Gilmore said. “We don’t have good maps of Woodberry from the earliest times.”
In some cases, a record of loved ones’ final resting places, exists only in the memories of those still living.
“As a little girl, my great aunt used to walk a lot. We would go out to the cemetery and just walk around. She’d tell me ‘So-and-so is buried here,’” Dickerson said. Information about the deceased, she added, remained within the family.
The association’s fundraising helps pay a nominal fee to a Richmond man with Gordonsville connections, who provides occasional groundskeeping services. But there’s so much more that needs to be done, according to Emily Winkey, who serves as trustee and president of the association.
“We really need help from the community,” Winkey said. With donated or discounted time, materials and labor, Winkey said the association could provide benches for visitors, directional signs, landscaping and road maintenance. With the help of a donation, the association could pay for regular maintenance and landscaping at the gravesites, so they would never again become overgrown.
For 12 years, the association has produced a calendar, which generates funds for the cemetery’s expenses through sponsorships. Individual days on the calendar list the birthdays, anniversaries, and other important days of the community members and businesses that pay sponsorships. And although the calendar has been a reliable fundraiser, it can only generate funds for the cemetery’s most pressing needs.
Other efforts, the association hopes, will help raise funds to undertake larger projects, from essential road and grounds maintenance to comprehensive recordkeeping and data collection.
“Last year we did our first gospel exposition that provided us with funds to do some small beautification projects,” Gilmore said. The sorts of maintenance and improvement projects the association hopes to complete, however, require far greater participation from the community, in terms of funds, materials and time. 
This year, association members expect to generate fun as well as funds with a one-of-a-kind benefit beauty pageant this weekend.
The United States Pageant fundraiser will require 50 contestants to secure as many donations as they can, and then represent their chosen state before the crowd. The pageant will be held April 12 at 4 p.m. at Union Baptist Church in Gordonsville. 
For more information about this weekend’s pageant, or to find out how to volunteer, donate or contribute to Woodberry Cemetery’s revitalization and maintenance, contact Emily Winkey (832-3055), Gloria Gilmore (832-3410) or Doretha Dickerson (832-3818).