April 15, 2010

Hampton Citizens Restore Historic Gravestones

A group of Hampton citizens recently embarked on an ambitious project to restore gravestones in a historic cemetery on King Street located next to the Armory building, which is home to several prominent local black leaders such as Mary Peake. On the day before Easter, as a gift to those buried in the cemetery, Bob Martin, Tony Sykes, W.L. Patrick, and father and son team Marvin and Tyrell Gilliam cleaned away decades of grime that had accumulated on gravestones, revealing the names written underneath.

The volunteer team partnered with Hampton Parks and Recreation to accomplish the cleaning effort, with volunteers providing cleaning supplies, materials and manpower, and Parks and Recreation providing the use of a city truck with a pressure washing system, operated that day by Senior Parks Technician Donald White. The team worked for seven hours to clean the gravestones, soaking them in a mold treating solution, hand scrubbing the stones, and finally using a pressure washer to rinse them.

The idea for the project arose one day while Martin walked through the cemetery, noticing that it was impossible to read the names on many of the headstones.

"There's so much history in that cemetery -- Hampton history and African American history," he said. "We wanted people to be able to identify the names on the stones so that they could learn about these people who played such a large part in building our city."

The King Street cemetery is a predominantly African American cemetery and is the resting place of local leaders such as Mary Peake, who founded the first school for blacks in Hampton, and John Phillips, Hampton's first African-American City Council member and vice mayor.

"This is an amazing place," Martin said of the cemetery. "Many of these people here were not born free or had parents who weren't born free. This is a part of our history that we need to pass on to our young people."

The team wasn't able to clean every stone in the cemetery but have plans to do so in the future.

"This is an ongoing project," Martin explained. "We want to clean the rest of the gravestones and mow and weed the entire cemetery. We also want to repair stones that have been damaged and reset stones that have fallen over."

Martin is no stranger to cemetery maintenance work. As a volunteer for the Association for the Restoration of Historical Cemeteries, Martin works with other local residents to maintain the historic cemeteries on King Street and behind the bus station on Pembroke Avenue. The association, led by Dr. Mary T. Christian for the past 20 years, performs regular upkeep of the cemeteries, striving to restore dignity to those resting there.

Martin hopes that more people will become involved in preserving these historical landmarks, especially the younger generations.

"It's important to know your own history," Martin said. "We travel all over the U.S. learning about the history of other places but a lot of times we don't even know about the history in our own town. It's time we changed that."

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Media Contact: Dianne Foster, Special Assistant to the City Manager; Tami Back, Public Communications Assistant