Historic Context
Penny Hill Cemetery was established as Alexandria’s public burial ground in 1795, when the Common Council appointed Colonel Francis Peyton, George Deneale, and James Keith to purchase between two and four acres at least half a mile beyond the west line of Washington Street. The committee selected a parcel of Spring Garden Farm, conveyed to the town in two deeds in May 1796. Located along what is today South Payne Street, the ground served the community as its principal potter’s field for more than 180 years.
A long-repeated tradition holds that an earlier Penny Hill burying ground lay along Great Hunting Creek at the foot of what is now South Royal Street, and that the town abandoned it because tidal flooding exposed coffins and bodies. That story rests on a single source: the recollections of an anonymous “Old Bachelor” published in the Local News in 1861. His account is internally inconsistent—he placed the 1803 yellow fever burials at the Royal Street site and claimed the Spring Garden Farm ground was purchased afterward, when the records show it was acquired in 1795, and the Rev. Dr. James Muir, preaching in December 1803, recorded the epidemic’s victims buried at Penny Hill. No other source confirms a burial ground at the creek, and whether one ever existed remains an open question.
The origin of the name is equally uncertain. Gilpin’s 1798 map shows a Penny Hill Street running east to west beside Great Hunting Creek, and the street appeared on maps into the 1870s before vanishing. It lay near the supposed Royal Street ground but nowhere near Spring Garden Farm, so it does not explain how the Payne Street cemetery came by its name. Whether the street was named for a burying ground, or whether “Penny Hill” was an informal term for a potter’s field that attached itself to both, has not been established.
Over time, Penny Hill became the final resting place for the town’s poor, destitute, and marginalized residents. Muir, in his sermon “Death Abolished,” recorded that 120 victims of the 1803 yellow fever epidemic were buried here. Before the establishment of the Contrabands and Freedmen’s Cemetery in 1864, Penny Hill also received formerly enslaved people and “contrabands” who died in Alexandria during the Civil War. More than 1,800 individuals are estimated to have been buried at Penny Hill, most in unmarked graves, and only a handful of gravestones survive. Visitors can sometimes find oyster shells marking grave sites, a tradition within African American burial practice symbolizing the soul’s return across the water to Africa.
Reverend James Muir recorded that 120 victims of the 1803 Yellow Fever epidemic were buried at Penny Hill. Before the establishment of the Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery in 1864, Penny Hill also served as a burial ground for formerly enslaved people and “contrabands” who died in Alexandria during the Civil War.
Today Penny Hill survives as a large open field, and its landscape continues to hold meaning. A surviving black cherry (Prunus serotina) has been recognized as a Notable Champion Tree with a registry score of 242, reflecting its girth, height, and crown spread.
Joseph Harris (c. 1766–c. 1833)
Manservant to Dr. James Craik; won his freedom in court
Joseph Harris was enslaved by Dr. James Craik, Washington’s friend and physician, and served as his personal manservant through the Revolution. When Craik joined the Continental Army as a surgeon in 1777, and when he became Chief Physician and Surgeon of the Army in 1781, Harris was at his side in the same camps and headquarters, though his name appears in none of the official records. He was still enslaved when Craik brought him to Alexandria in 1783. Virginia law required an owner to register an enslaved person entering the state, and Craik never did. Ten years later Harris sued for his freedom in the Alexandria Hustings Court on that omission, carried the case to the state’s appeals court, and won. He lived as a free man in Alexandria for some forty years and died around 1832 to 1834, at about sixty-seven. Craik died in 1814 and is honored by a granite monument raised in 1928 in the Presbyterian Meeting House burial ground, though burials there had been halted in 1804 and banned in 1809, and his actual resting place is uncertain. Harris lies at Penny Hill, his grave unmarked and its location unknown. He helped win the country’s freedom before he won his own.
Joseph McCoy (Date of Death April 23, 1897) Lynching Victim
Joseph McCoy, a young African American, was lynched by a white mob in Alexandria on April 23, 1897. After two violent attempts to storm the police station where he was held, the mob succeeded in dragging him from his cell. McCoy was shot, beaten, and hanged from a lamppost at Cameron and Lee Streets. His aunt, refusing to take responsibility for the burial, declared: “As the people killed him, they will have to bury him.” McCoy was interred in a pauper’s grave at Penny Hill, dressed in a simple white shirt, light trousers, and a dark coat, inside a pine coffin provided by the city.
John Pipsico (c. 1749–1842)
Freeman of color, Revolutionary War veteran
John Pipsico was born free in Virginia around 1749. In September 1780, in his thirties and under no compulsion to serve, he enlisted in Fairfax County in Captain John Snead’s company of the 3rd Virginia Regiment. The Southern Campaign carried him through four of its hardest fights: Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirk’s Hill, Ninety-Six, and Eutaw Springs. He was discharged at Richmond in the autumn of 1782 and came home to Alexandria, where he married Catherine and raised a family of at least nine children. In 1818 he appeared before the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of Columbia to apply for a pension, declaring himself in reduced circumstances and in need of his country’s assistance; his entire estate, six old chairs, two pots, and a half dozen cups, saucers, knives, and forks, was valued at five dollars and fifty cents. He signed with an X. Pipsico died on December 1, 1842, at about ninety-three, one of the last surviving Revolutionary soldiers in Alexandria, and was buried at Penny Hill in an unmarked grave. His pension file, S36230, remains the principal record that he lived.
Benjamin Thomas (Date of death August 8, 1899) Lynching Victim
Two years later, another Black teenager, Benjamin Thomas, was lynched at age 16. Dragged through the streets by a mob from the city jail, he was beaten, stabbed, and hanged at the corner of King and Fairfax Streets, within sight of City Hall. His pleas for his mother echoed as the violence unfolded. After a funeral at Shiloh Baptist Church, Thomas was buried at Penny Hill. Later attempts by the Black community to reinter him at Douglass Cemetery remain unverified, and the exact location of his grave is unknown.
These tragic events mark Penny Hill as not only Alexandria’s earliest public cemetery but also a witness to the city’s darkest racial violence.
Updated: September 2026
Sources of Information
City of Alexandria. (n.d.). Joseph McCoy historical marker. City of Alexandria, VA. https://www.alexandriava.gov
City of Alexandria. (n.d.). Benjamin Thomas historical marker. City of Alexandria, VA. https://www.alexandriava.gov
City of Alexandria. (n.d.). Alexandria Black history resources. City of Alexandria, VA. https://www.alexandriava.gov
Muir, J. (n.d.). Records of the Presbyterian Meeting House [Manuscript]. Old Presbyterian Meeting House Archives, Alexandria, VA.
Pippenger, W. E. (1992). Tombstone inscriptions of Alexandria, Virginia (Vol. 1–3). Family Line Publications.
