Annie Mosby has a rich family history in Pittsylvania County, and many of her relatives were both born and buried there. Throughout the 1900s, they were laid to rest in a 2.5-acre family cemetery in a community called Callahan Hill.
Her father died in 2001, followed by her uncle in 2006. They both wanted to be buried in this cemetery alongside their siblings, in-laws and parents, who were some of the first Black landowners in the county, Mosby said.
But by the time the Wilson brothers died, the land was no longer an active cemetery. Instead, it was the site of a 199-foot-tall cell tower, which still stands today.
“That communication tower is sitting in the middle of the graveyard,” Mosby said.
By the time Mosby, who left Danville at 17 years old and has lived in California since, found out about the cell tower construction through the family grapevine, it was too late. The steel lattice tower, operated by telecommunications company Crown Castle, had already been built.
She wrote to everyone she could think of between 2002 and 2006 — local newspapers, county officials, Virginia’s attorney general, the cellphone tower company and then-Gov. Tim Kaine.
Not one of them was able to help her, she said. “They sent me back excuses,” or didn’t respond at all.
There was no formal record of Mosby’s family owning the cemetery land. When her grandfather bought the land in 1912, the transaction involved no more than a handshake and a cash payment, leaving no paper record.
These kinds of informal transactions were common, especially in communities of color, said Joanna Green, a cemetery archaeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
“The unfortunate downstream effect is a gradual loss of knowledge,” Green said.
There are things that localities and family members can do to protect the cemeteries they know about, and to be mindful of the ones they don’t, said Green. DHR can help with this process, she said, as can a locality’s geographic information system and circuit court.
But for Mosby, two decades later, any restitution for her family feels like “a lost cause,” she said.
In a county like Pittsylvania, where families have lived in the same community for generations, it can be hard to know where cemeteries exist.
Outside of preserving cemeteries for posterity and sentimentality, locating these sites is also important because of the county’s increasing development and economic growth.
If nothing is done on a county level, those graves could belong to whichever company might buy that land, like Crown Castle purchasing Mosby’s family cemetery.
The preservation of historic cemeteries has been handled in a few different ways by Pittsylvania County. At least one cemetery is being relocated in the face of development at the Berry Hill industrial park. Another is being worked around by developers building on nearby land.
These two cemeteries are some of the “lucky” ones, because they will be preserved in one form or another, said Jane Massey, who also lost a family cemetery in Pittsylvania.
The graves of Massey’s ancestors were never properly marked or mapped, so family members have forgotten the exact location of the cemeteries over time.
“With so much land being developed, I have often wondered if it is still there,” said Massey, who grew up in Pittsylvania but now lives in South Carolina.
Another family, the Powell siblings, have also lost track of a family cemetery in Pittsylvania that was located on their family farm before it was sold in the early 1990s.
These stories are not uncommon — they are the flipside of the historic cemetery preservation projects in Pittsylvania. These are the graves that don’t get saved.
Losing cemeteries to development
Mosby’s grandfather, James Wilson, paid cash for a 15-acre parcel of land off of U.S. 58, going west from Danville toward Martinsville. About 2.5 acres of this land became the family cemetery, Mosby said.
“They didn’t do documentation or records of it,” Mosby said. “They just shook hands on it.”
By 2000, the owners of a parcel including the cemetery sold the land without an exclusion for that 2.5-acre portion where Mosby’s ancestors were buried.
The new owner agreed to a cell tower project, working with the communications company and the county to get the proper permitting and notifying all nearby residents, including Mosby’s father.
“When the letter arrived at my father’s home, he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,” Mosby wrote in a letter to Crown Castle in 2002. “The family member who was caring for my father did not understand the importance of the letter.”
Mosby’s family missed the public hearing about the cell tower project in 2000, and she did not find out about it until it had already been built.
Mosby returned to Pittsylvania to search for a deed or record of the sale for the land. She had no luck, she said.
Another part of the problem was that the cemetery was not easily visible. Few of the graves were marked by headstones, Mosby said, though all of the burials in this cemetery can be researched through the Watkins and Cunningham Funeral Home.
A lack of markers makes it difficult to preserve cemeteries in the face of development, Green said. “We can’t protect what we don’t know about,” she said.
This is not Mosby’s only family cemetery in Danville. Some of her ancestors were enslaved at Berry Hill and are likely buried on that former plantation.
“The issue of ‘lost’ cemeteries is one that disproportionately affects communities of color, whether urban or rural, with the marginalization of these communities reflected in the marginal locations of their sacred spaces,” Green said.
After hearing nothing back from local and state officials, all that was left to do was to make sure her buried family was remembered, Mosby said.
In 2008, she erected a memorial to her deceased ancestors on a plot adjacent to the cell tower, which still belonged to one of her family members.
A wrought iron fence marks off a rectangle of space, containing a stone statue of Jesus, a pot for flowers and engraved markers naming some of her buried family members.
The land around the memorial, right off the highway, is cleared. And on the wooded hill behind it, shooting out above the trees, is the steel cell tower.
Losing cemeteries to time and memory
Jane Massey’s last memory of visiting her family cemetery was in the 1960s, when she, then a newly licensed driver, took her aunt to visit the family farm in Pittsylvania where the cemetery was located.
The farm has since been sold to a lumber company, and Massey, now 80 years old, can’t exactly recall where the cemetery is.
“All I have for directions is that it is located on Henry’s Mill Road about 2 miles from the county line … and if you pass Zion Baptist Chapel you have gone too far,” Massey said. “At one time it was visible from the road but not anymore.”
She remembers mostly rocks marking the graves, although there were a few headstones, she said. The oldest of the graves was probably from around 1890, though she’s not certain.
It’s been about six years since Massey last visited Pittsylvania from her home in South Carolina to try to locate the cemetery, she said.
“The last time I was there, I just saw woods, real thick woods,” she said, saying that she doesn’t have any plans to look again in the near future. “That’s a long trip for me.”
Most of her descendants aren’t interested in locating the cemetery, Massey said.
“My grandkids couldn’t care less,” she said.
When she was young, though, Massey was a regular visitor to her ancestors’ graves.
“It used to be that we would go in the spring and we would clean the graves and put flowers on them,” she said. “I just feel bad I can’t find it again, and I know it’s there.”
The Powell siblings have a similar story, and they often reminisce with family members about their “missing” cemetery, though they’ve gotten no closer to locating it.
Stewart, Terri Anne and Ken Powell descend from the Wyatt family in Pittsylvania, which once owned a lot of farmland in the county.
“As kids, we used to go to the farm I’d say once a month,” said Ken, the oldest of the three siblings, who recalled placing flowers on the graves on holidays, especially on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
This was in the late 1950s through the ’70s, Terri Anne said. Today, the siblings have only vague memories of where the farm was.
“You get on [Franklin Turnpike] for what felt like forever when I was a little kid, but it was probably only 40 or 50 miles, if that,” said Stewart. “And I remember passing a general store.”
The siblings have looked into family history and property records, but they haven’t unearthed much more about the location, they said, though they know the farm was sold in the early 1990s.
“One of the issues is that when you say the Wyatt farm, I think there were a lot of Wyatt farms, or one big one that got subdivided,” Ken said. “The best I can remember, it’s between Swansonville and Callands.”
The Powell siblings remember the Wyatt cemetery being visible, but not easy to get to.
“There was an iron, fenced-off area that was the graveyard,” Ken Powell said. “It was a walk through a pasture to get there. There was no way to drive there.”
None of the siblings live in Pittsylvania anymore, with Terri Anne in Atlanta, Stewart in Dallas and Ken in Richmond.
There’s no way to know for sure if this cemetery has remained undisturbed.
“We aren’t aware of any development, but there’s also no reason we would be,” Terri Anne said.
The Virginia law outlines multiple avenues for the lawful relocation of buried human remains, Green said.
“Short of placing some form of legally protective covenant or preservation easement over the property, however, there is absolutely nothing in Virginia law that guarantees a cemetery’s right to remain where it is,” she said.
Younger generations should take an interest in their family history, Green said, especially if family property or cemeteries haven’t been properly marked or preserved.
“Like all family lore, information becomes increasingly murky over time and may eventually disappear,” she said. “Families and communities should speak with their elders now, before memory is lost.”
How to protect historic cemeteries
Mosby’s family land is hardly the only example of historic cemeteries being developed over.
One anecdote comes from the Danville Historical Society, which has a plot map from Dan River Mills, the former textile giant and the city’s main industry until it shuttered in 2006.
“You can see the old road near the river, which is now Memorial Drive, and you can see two graves,” said archivist Cody Foster. “All it says is ‘old graves,’ and we think they were at least from the 18th century. … It looks like they’re under Memorial Drive now.”
This is unsurprising in places like Danville and Pittsylvania, which have such rich histories, said Matt Rowe, Pittsylvania’s economic development director, who is working on the cemetery relocation project to move graves at the Berry Hill industrial park.
“Not to sound ugly, but we’re walking and driving on top of graves all the time and we don’t even know it,” he said. “That’s just the reality. People have lived on the land that we’re living on today for generations before us.”
If families know the exact locations of these cemeteries, there are channels to protect them from development.
Every Virginia locality has some sort of mapping system, usually GIS-based, to refer to for land-use decisions. People who want to protect a cemetery should contact their local planning office to ask about how to have the cemetery properly mapped, Green said.
Localities may have zoning ordinances in place to further protect cemeteries, beyond what the state requires, she said.
Cemeteries should also be documented with DHR, Green said. Many localities use the department’s records to check if historic resources exist on developable land.
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act “requires federal agencies that permit, license or fund land-use activities to consider the effects on their decisions on historic properties, in consultation with our office and the interested public,” Green said.
“We can and will bring the presence of known cemeteries to the attention of these agencies,” she said.
DHR has a survey form for citizens who want to document a cemetery and create a permanent record within the organization’s GIS-based archive, she said.
Green encouraged Virginians to contact the department if they have questions about whether a cemetery has been recorded.
“Most of the forms I receive do not come from descendants, but rather from property owners, historical society members, and generally interested folks with no family connection but a need to see these places acknowledged,” Green said.
This is something Massey or the Powell siblings could do, if they ever find their lost cemeteries.
None of the Powells has been back to Pittsylvania to search for the cemetery, though Stewart has plans to visit this spring, he said.
“It’s a great example of would’ve, should’ve, could’ve,” said Terry Anne. “We would give anything to have more memories. … It really is an amazing history and of course it’s very special to us, but we don’t know enough about it.”
