In response to growing health concerns and the need for a non-denominational municipal burial ground, Alexandria’s Common Council appointed a committee in August 1795, composed of Colonel Francis Peyton, George Deneale, and James Keith, to select a suitable site. The committee was instructed to purchase land “not less than two acres, nor exceeding four acres—not nearer to any part of the town than half a mile from the west line of Washington Street.”
The committee reported on September 22, 1795, that they had selected and acquired a parcel of Spring Garden Farm, which was formally conveyed to the town in two transactions on May 6 and May 24, 1796. The new ground, located inland along what is today South Payne Street, became known as Penny Hill Cemetery.
A long-repeated tradition holds that this was a replacement for an earlier Penny Hill burying ground at the south end of Royal Street beside Hunting Creek. That tradition 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 bought afterward, when the records show it was acquired in 1795, and Dr. Muir, preaching in the closing weeks of 1803, recorded the epidemic’s victims buried at Penny Hill. No other source confirms a burial ground at the Royal Street site. A Penny Hill Street did appear on maps into the 1870s, one block south of South Street and near the supposed Royal Street ground, but that street lay nowhere near Spring Garden Farm, so it cannot account for the name of the cemetery on Payne Street. Whether the street took its name from a burying ground, or an informal term for a potter’s field simply attached itself to the street, is unresolved. Whether any earlier cemetery existed there remains an open question.
Penny Hill served Alexandria’s poor and unclaimed dead and played a critical role during public health crises. Its first great test came in 1803, when yellow fever swept the town; the Rev. Dr. James Muir of the Presbyterian Church of Alexandria, in his sermon “Death Abolished,” preached that December and printed the following year, recorded that 120 victims of the epidemic were buried at Penny Hill. The ground functioned as the town’s principal potter’s field for more than 180 years.
It is estimated that over 1,800 individuals were interred at Penny Hill, most in unmarked graves. Today, only a few gravestones remain, serving as modest yet poignant reminders of Alexandria’s civic responsibility toward its most vulnerable residents.