The new Alexandria Historical Society digital museum is live — a free online collection of exhibits tracing our city’s story from its earliest days to the modern era — and I could not be prouder of what the Society has built. I was honored to join the panel at the launch celebration, and even more honored by something I found inside the museum itself: Gravestone Stories research features in two of its exhibits.
“A Community of Cemeteries” tells the origin story of the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex — how the yellow fever epidemic of 1803 led Alexandria to ban new burial plots within town limits, and how the city’s churches answered by establishing burial grounds just across the boundary in Fairfax County. Thirteen cemeteries would grow there over the next 130 years, from Penny Hill in 1796 to Agudas Achim in 1933, forming the most historic cluster of cemeteries in the United States. The exhibit was adapted from my article on the complex, and it is a fine, concise telling of a story I never tire of sharing on Wilkes Street itself.
“Pro Revolution and Pro-Monarchy?” features one of the burial grounds’ most fascinating residents: Colonel Lewis Nicola, the Continental Army officer who in 1782 suggested to George Washington that America might do well with a king. Washington’s reply remains one of the most forceful letters he ever wrote — he viewed the idea “with abhorrence” — and Nicola apologized within days. He later moved to Alexandria and rests today in the Old Presbyterian Meeting House burial ground. The exhibit draws on my research into Nicola’s remarkable life, and links to the full story here on Gravestone Stories.
Full disclosure: I serve as the Society’s treasurer, so I watched this project take shape from the inside — but the museum is the work of many dedicated hands, and it deserves every visitor it gets. It joins a growing collection of ways to explore Alexandria’s history online, and I’m glad Gravestone Stories could contribute to its foundation.
Explore the museum at alexandria.ahs.yourcultureconnect.com. And if the exhibits send you down the cemetery rabbit hole — as they should — our free walking tour guides and brochures will take you the rest of the way, on foot.