Site Type: Cemetery or Memorial

Historical Significance:

Dating from the early 1860s, Oakwood is the second oldest public cemetery in Charlottesville. The fourteen-acre plot was once part of influential Charlottesville resident Alexander Garrett’s one-hundred and seventeen acre estate, “Oak Hill.” Following Garrett’s death in 1860 the city purchased the cemetery property. The original cemetery consisted of seven acres along 1^st street between present day Oak Street and Elliott Ave, approximately twenty-five percent of which, in the extreme southern portion, was designated the “colored section.”

In 1873 the Daughters of Zion, an all women African-American society, created a two-acre independent plot across Oak Street to provide a dignified resting place for those African-Americans who did not wish to be buried in Oakwood’s segregated section. According to a report by Ted Delaney, the Daughters of Zion continued to own and manage this cemetery from 1873 to sometime in the 1920s or early 1930s. It was during this period that most of the burials there took place. Sometime during the late 20s or 30s the Daughters of Zion disbanded, and their cemetery had no official ownership until the city assumed title to the property in the 1970s.

The Daughters of Zion Cemetery served as the burial place of many prominent African-American Charlottesville residents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One such figure was Benjamin Tonsler (1854-1917), a pioneer educator of African-Americans for whom Tonsler Park in Charlottesville is named. Tonsler was a former slave who attended the Hampton Institute and returned to Charlottesville to become a teacher and then principal for almost thirty years at Jefferson Graded School. He took personal risks in order to help many African-American students gain an education beyond the legal eighth grade during segregation, teaching advanced texts after school. Tonsler was also a friend of Booker T. Washington and played an important role in Charlottesville’s civil rights movement. He is buried in the Daughters of Zion Cemetery next to his wife, Fannie Gildersleeve Tonsler.

Other African-Americans buried in the Daughters of Zion Cemetery include Kenneth Walker and Dorothy Murray Allen, former owners of the Rose Hill Market on Rose Hill Drive, Rev. M. T. Lewis and Rev. Jesse Herndon, former local ministers at First Baptist Church and Mt. Zion Baptist Church, respectively, and Bernard A. Coles, a local dentist and the first president of the Charlottesville chapter of the NAACP. Charles E. Coles and his descendants, who owned and operated Charlottesville’s leading black construction firm which specialized in building and renovating residences at the turn of the century, are buried in the “colored section” of Oakwood.

Physical Description: