On the morning of Thursday, January 27, 1881, word spread through the city that grave robbers in Alexandria had struck in the night. The Alexandria Gazette reported that the news “created a profound sensation, it being the first time that such a bold attempt at ‘body snatching’ was ever made in Alexandria.” Two bodies had been taken from their graves in the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex. One of them was the daughter of the man whose job was to guard the Presbyterian Cemetery, its sexton, Jerry Frazier.
Jerry Frazier, Sexton and Gardener
Jeremiah H. “Jerry” Frazier was a free Black man, recorded in Alexandria’s Free Negro Registers in 1842 as twenty-four years old and “born free.” He made his living from the soil. He kept extensive gardens near his home at the corner of South Washington and Franklin Streets, rented a stall at the Alexandria Market from at least 1857 into the 1870s, and in later years advertised himself in the Gazette as “The Professional Gardener,” ready to trim grape vines in season. His family may have had roots at Mount Vernon: historian Greg A. Beaman, in his documentary study of Market Square for Alexandria Archaeology, suggests, as a plausible but unproven connection, that his father may have been Edward “Ned” Frazier, a gardener at Mount Vernon freed in 1817.
Frazier also served, for a number of years, as sexton of the Presbyterian Cemetery, opening graves and keeping watch over the burial ground on Wilkes Street. As the cemetery’s superintendent today, I count him among the people who have cared for this ground before me, and his story belongs to its history. In January 1881, his own cemetery was one of the two burial grounds the grave robbers in Alexandria came to.
Grave Robbers in Alexandria: The Night of January 26, 1881
In January 1881, Miss Elmira Jacobs, about seventy years old, died in Washington. Her gravestone, which spells her name Almira, gives the date of her death as January 9; the Gazette, writing on January 27, said she had died “rather suddenly, Sunday last,” which would place it on January 23, just days before the robbery. She was the daughter of the late Presley Jacobs, a veteran listed on our War of 1812 registry, and the sister of Mrs. W. H. McKnight of Alexandria. Her remains were brought home and buried on Tuesday in the Presbyterian Cemetery, “of which Jerry Frazier, colored, is sexton.” In the Gazette’s words, “it was far from the mind of the sexton that there lived a man with a heart so hard as to wish anything but peace to the inhabitants of the ‘silent city’ under his care.”
The Jacobs family remains part of the Meeting House story. The Reverend Dr. Edna Jacobs Banes, a descendant of the Jacobs family, was called as the Old Presbyterian Meeting House’s third associate pastor. She was the first woman to serve there as a minister of the Word and Sacrament, and she served until she was called to Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond in 2001. She also married my wife and me in 1991.
About ten o’clock Wednesday night, Emmanuel Webb, who lived at the corner of the lane leading to the graveyards and served as sexton of several of them, heard a wagon coming up the road. He called out to the driver, who said he was on his way to “Vinegar Hill” but had mistaken the road. Webb watched the wagon turn into the lane leading to St. Paul’s Cemetery, on the east side of which was an entrance to the Presbyterian yard. With a Black man named John Landon, he followed and found the wagon, a tight-top vehicle with a dark bay horse and straw spread across its floor, standing at the side entrance with no driver.
Two men soon came out of the yard. Asked what business they had in a graveyard at that hour, they said they were bound for Vinegar Hill and had lost their way, that they lived in the country about four miles out but could not name the place or any neighbors, and that they were looking for a man named Harris. Webb sent Landon for a policeman and started up the lane to see whether anything had been disturbed. The two men jumped into the wagon and drove off at full speed down Wilkes Street.
Officers Goodrich and Pat Hayes went out with Webb. In the Presbyterian yard they found the body of Miss Jacobs lying at the foot of the grave in which she had been placed only the Tuesday before. The grave had been filled back in, and little else showed that anyone had been at work. The undertaker, B. Wheatley, took her body to his establishment, where the only marks found were ridges around both wrists, made by the rope used to draw her from the coffin.
A Sexton’s Daughter
Early the next morning, Captain Webster of the police and Officer Goodrich returned to the graveyards and followed footprints to the southwestern corner of the cemetery of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, today’s Union Cemetery. There they found the body of Sarah Jane Simms, “colored daughter of Jerry Frazier, sexton of the Presbyterian Cemetery,” who had died the week before of consumption. She lay beside the grave in which she had been buried on Monday. Walter Daily, sexton of that ground, took charge of her body, and she was reburied that morning.
Both graves had been filled in again, and the bodies laid out ready to be carried away. The Gazette concluded that they “had been taken out of their graves by parties who had been hired by the men who came after them.” Webb described the two men in the wagon as disguised, about five feet eight inches tall and slender, and “supposed to be white.”
We do not know where Sarah Jane Simms lies within Union Cemetery; no stone has been found for her. Her father had spent years making sure that the dead in his care were left in peace. On the same night that grave robbers in Alexandria came for a woman buried in his cemetery, they took his own daughter from hers.
Tracking the Grave Robbers in Alexandria
That afternoon, Officers Goodrich and Arnold arrested four Black gravediggers who worked in the cemeteries, Thomas Vaughan, Baptist Carpenter, Charles Gaskins, and Reuben Massey, and held them for examination. Virginia did little to deter grave robbers in Alexandria or anywhere else in the state. As the Gazette noted, “the law of Virginia against the robbing of graves is extremely light”: anyone who unlawfully disinterred a body faced no more than a year in jail and a fine of up to $500.
The hearing opened the next morning before Mayor Smith, with the station house “crowded with anxious spectators, both white and colored.” By then Albert Butler, a Black driver for an undertaking establishment, had been arrested as well. Carpenter testified that Butler had seen him on Monday night with Simms’s coffin case and asked whether he wanted to make some money by “taking up a few bodies,” saying he knew a doctor in Washington who would give two dollars apiece for “subjects.” Carpenter said he told Butler he “would not do such a job for fifty dollars.” John G. Philips, who carried the mail, testified that on Tuesday night at the Washington and Alexandria depot he had met a “heavy bearded, respectable looking gentleman in a much excited state” who introduced himself as Dr. Riley of Washington and was looking for a light-skinned man who drove a wagon.
Vaughan testified that Butler had paid him two dollars to keep watch while Butler went to take up a body, and Walter Daily, whose tool house stood in St. Paul’s Cemetery, described how the grave of Sarah Jane Simms had been emptied and her body drawn out with a rope. The court sent Butler on to the grand jury. Gaskins and Massey were discharged for lack of evidence, and Vaughan and Carpenter were held for court on $250 bail each.
A day later, Vaughan confessed. He told the officers that Carpenter was innocent, that he and Butler had removed the bodies for men who were to come for them from Washington, and that they had hidden the tools at Spring Garden, in Grave Yard Lane, where Vaughan lived. Officers Edward Goodrich and Julian Arnold found the picks and shovels there, and at the house where Butler boarded, at Prince and Alfred Streets, officers found a coffin screw and a pair of pants covered with mud.
Three weeks later, Alexandria officials on business in Washington happened to meet Dr. Riley, who, not knowing who they were, talked freely about his visit to Alexandria on the night of January 26. He said he had come to see a Black man named Charles Chapman, a former patient. The Gazette reported that Governor Holliday would be asked for a requisition to bring Dr. Riley to Virginia “to answer the charge of being a party to the unlawful removal of two dead human bodies from their graves in the cemeteries of this city.” The surviving newspaper accounts do not tell us how the cases ended.
What the grave robbers in Alexandria did that winter was part of an old and ugly story. In the nineteenth century, medical schools needed bodies for anatomy instruction, and the poor, and Black Americans above all, were the people whose graves were most often robbed to supply them. In Alexandria in 1881, the men who dug up the graves were paid a few dollars, while the doctor waiting in Washington was the one who stood to profit.
Remembering Jerry Frazier
Sixteen years after grave robbers in Alexandria disturbed his daughter’s rest, Jerry Frazier died in April 1897. The Gazette remembered him as “an old and much respected colored resident” who “for a number of years was sexton of the Presbyterian Cemetery” and “also was a vine dresser and gardener.” In the manner of its time, the paper added that he “always enjoyed the confidence of his white acquaintances, and was a true type of the ante bellum colored man.” The line says more about the newspaper than about the man. Frazier was born free, owned his own home, ran his own business, and for years looked after the graves of Alexandria’s Presbyterians.
We do not yet know where Jerry Frazier himself is buried. If you have information about his grave, or about the grave of his daughter Sarah Jane Simms in Union Cemetery, I would be glad to hear from you.
Sources of Information
Alexandria Gazette, January 27, 1881, p. 3, “Grave Robbers in Alexandria – Their Work Last Night.”
Alexandria Gazette, January 28, 1881, p. 3, “Trial of the Graverobbers – Three of the Accused Sent to the Grand Jury.”
Alexandria Gazette, January 29, 1881, p. 3, “The Ghouls in Jail – Further Developments.”
Alexandria Gazette, February 18, 1881, “What Dr. Riley Says.”
Alexandria Gazette, April 26, 1897, “Death of a Colored Resident.”
Alexandria Free Negro Registers, vol. 2, p. 25, June 25, 1842 (Jeremiah H. Frazier).
Beaman, G. A. (2026). Alexandria City Hall, Market Square, and slavery: A documentary study (Alexandria Archaeology Publication No. 149). Office of Historic Alexandria, City of Alexandria, Virginia.
Miller, T. M. (2015). Murder and mayhem: Criminal conduct in old Alexandria, Virginia, 1749–1900. Heritage Books. Chapter Four, “Graverobbing,” pp. 27–31. (Miller dates the first three Gazette articles to 1880; the day-of-week details in the testimony confirm 1881.)
Pippenger, W. E. (1992). Tombstone Inscriptions of Alexandria, Virginia: Volume 1. Family Line Publications. Inscription of Almira Jacobs, Presbyterian Cemetery.