VCU parking lot debate inflamed

The debate about the VCU-owned parking lot in Shockoe Bottom was reignited this summer when the university made the decision to repave the asphalt. Some maintain that the lot is a slave burial ground, and that using the location for parking is dishonoring those buried beneath.

“We were appalled and saddened,” said Ana Edwards, the chair of the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project for the Richmond Defenders. Edwards said she hoped that under a new university administration, circumstances might change.

Pamela Lepley, director of university communications and public relations, said the Slave Trail Commission conducted a study and they believe the majority of the burial ground is underneath Interstate 95.

Shockoe Creek used to regularly flood the area where the parking lot is until it was placed into an underground conduit in the 1930s. The conduit is roughly 30 feet wide and 20 feet tall, and goes under much of the parking lot, says Brian Ohlinger, the associate vice president of facilities management.

“Anything that would have been original to the site would have at that point been disrupted,” Ohlinger said. “There is an archeologist from the Virginia State Historical Society whose view is that there’s probably none of it that’s under the parking lot.”

However, Michael Blakey, the director of the Institute for Historical Biology which is affiliated with the College of William & Mary, did an assessment of the Department of Historical Resources report, and concluded that the “evidence of VCU parking lot encroachment over the cemetery is substantial.”

Lyle Browning, an archaeologist based out of Midlothian, has floated the idea that covering a burial ground with asphalt might actually help preserve the site. To this Edwards responds, “Then I feel we could repave over Hollywood Cemetery too.”