HAMPTON — When Elmerton Cemetery began laying people to rest in the 1850s, much of Hampton’s history was yet to be written.
As the Civil War erupted in 1861, Fort Monroe became a Union stronghold as Virginia seceded to the Confederacy. Three enslaved men — Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker and James Townsend — escaped a Confederate battery installation in Norfolk to Fort Monroe, where a Union general opted not to return them and harbor them as war contraband.
Despite Confederate soldiers razing Hampton that fall in response, thousands of slaves flocked to Fort Monroe throughout the war seeking freedom, and Elmerton Cemetery became the burial site for pioneers who built what became modern-day Hampton. But an official tally of how many people are buried at the cemetery is unknown.
An angel sits atop a headstone for a young child at Elmerton Cemetery in Hampton on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. (Kendall Warner/The Virginian-Pilot)
With a new $30,000 grant from the Outsider Preservation Initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation, local organization Barrett-Peake Heritage Foundation is using ground-penetrating radar to find out how many people are buried in the 3.1-acre cemetery between Interstate 64 and East Pembroke Avenue.
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“We knew that Elmerton was a Civil War cemetery, and in Elmerton would-be leaders in the 19th century who lived throughout the early 20th century,” said Barrett-Peake President Colita Nichols Fairfax. “We suspected for years that hundreds of people were buried at Elmerton. That grant funded an analysis, and what has been preliminarily determined is that there might be thousands.”
The radar uses pulses to create images beneath the ground and provide mapping for the cemetery’s graves without disturbing any remains, Nichols Fairfax said. Over the next few months, the organization intends to collect more thorough imaging. However, the technology is unable to identify the remains.
“The grant doesn’t cover the invasive,” Nichols Fairfax said. “What we’re interested in is determining how many people are there and if anything else is detected at the burial grounds.”
Barrett-Peake is a Hampton-based organization focused on cemetery preservation whose namesakes, Mary Peake and Jake Barrett, are buried in family plots in Elmerton, according to Nichols Fairfax.
One of the ways Barrett-Peake is sifting through generations of people and thousands or remains is through cultural traditions. According to Nichols Fairfax, many families share one headstone. Additionally, it was common among Black families to bury people with their heads facing west, something Barrett-Peake aims to use to provide a more detailed accounting in their research.
The project’s goal is to connect local descendants to a lineage that often undocumented or unpreserved, as well as highlight the contraband community that shaped Hampton, Nichols Fairfax said. Part of that also includes using the grant to build signage to mark the historic site and collaborating with local partners to share genealogy and burial records to help connect people to their roots. Barrett-Peake partners with Serve the City Peninsula, another local organization, to maintain the cemetery.
“We can do some of the things that the community has wanted to do right for a long time, and we just haven’t been able to because it’s not funded,” Nichols Fairfax said. “It will really showcase evidence that this was a freedom colony, a community that was active because people believed so much in freedom.”
Devlin Epding, 757-510-4037, devlin.epding@virginiamedia.com
https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/08/30/elmerton-cemetery-radar/
