A Trip to Little Petersburg
- Deborah Newman
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Photos and an interview with descendant James Bruce Monroe at a historic Black cemetery in Orange County, VA
Jan 31, 2026
"Oscar Davis. He died in 1968, and I would have been about 14 years old at the time,” James Bruce Monroe told me as we stood in the old, disused cemetery behind the home of his 95-year-old father, also James Monroe. “As a kid I remember him, and I think he had a brother. They used to sit outside the house, just sitting out there, you know. That's mainly what I remember, but I was told that he was a deacon at the church also," Monroe, who goes by Bruce, said. (Monroe’s memory serves him well. Mr. Davis was a deacon in his church.)
It’s a small burial ground, about seven miles north of James Madison’s Montpelier. One might charitably call it rugged, but it’s definitely not abandoned.
The area is rich in history. James Madison’s brothers also owned land—and people—in the neighborhood, given to them by their father, James Sr. Brother William christened his 1,300-acre plantation Woodberry Forest. Francis called his 1,000-acre property Prospect Hill. (The family cemetery on that land, where Francis is buried, is just a mile away.)
In November 2021 and March 2022, volunteers did major cleanups of the graveyard—following minor cleanups—with the Orange County Historical Society and Orange County African American Historical Society. You can walk the site easily and see the gravestones.
Morning at Little Petersburg Cemetery, Orange County, Virginia. January 8, 2026
“Living right over the hill, I can remember lots of burials, lots of funerals, funeral processions and so forth,” Monroe said. “Sometimes in the middle of winter, when the roads weren’t paved—all of them were dirt roads—[people] had trouble getting the vehicles and the casket to the burial site.”
Gravestones at Little Petersburg Cemetery, Orange County, VA. January 8, 2026
Mike Saxton, a former trustee of Graham Cemetery (also in Orange County) counted over 80 burials when he visited, “but there could be a lot more,” Monroe said. There are only a dozen or so identifiable grave markers, actual headstones with inscriptions for people born in the late 19th and early 20th century, but a profusion of what appear to be field stones, large rocks used to mark graves. “When we first started clearing it, we thought that they were just plain rocks, so some of them might have been moved,” Monroe said. They’re common at burial grounds for the enslaved, but have been used as grave markers around the world for centuries.
The cemetery has at least two names. Monroe refers to it as Little Petersburg Cemetery. On FindaGrave.com, it’s called Fisherman’s Lodge, aka Galilean Fishermen Cemetery. Both names point to essential pieces of African American history, both local and national.
“Little Petersburg” emerged from the 1867 purchase of land by three African American men—Ruben Hackett, Winston Snead, and Cele Walker—from Charles Lewis Bankhead, who just seven years earlier had held 20 Black people in bondage, the youngest were a girl and a boy, both one year old, according to the 1860 US Census. Snead and Walker bought more land from Bankhead, who sold plots to other African Americans as well. “Over the next decades, these properties were divided and sold to other freed blacks,” according to a history Monroe wrote of Little Petersburg. It became one of many free towns or freedmen’s communities in the area and across the South.
The name “Fisherman’s Lodge” comes from the Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, an African American beneficial organization founded in 1856 in Baltimore. The Fishermen were among the “the most influential” Baltimore secret societies at the turn of the century, earning a positive mention from W.E.B. Du Bois in a 1907 study he edited, Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans. Thirty years earlier, the white press was drawn to the “Peculiarities of a Large Secret Society of Colored People in Baltimore” when a dispute between two members became public. The interests of the Baltimore Bulletin—and the New York Times, which reprinted the story on August 8, 1877—were prurient and its tone patronizing, but the writer did acknowledge the organization’s good work “among the colored residents.”
The Fishermen built a meeting hall, Evergreen Tabernacle #147, on this small parcel in Little Petersburg. It served as their lodge, but also as a school and a church (Little Petersburg Baptist). “[R]eligious services were held on the fourth Sunday of each month,” descendant Alexis Kemper writes in her brief history of the church. The congregation quickly outgrew the small building, so they built a new church at a different site, eventually changing the name to Bethel Baptist. The cemetery passed through several hands until recently being transferred to the trustees of Bethel Baptist, along with the lodge and an adjoining plot of land held by a family trust. (Monroe and Kemper are Bethel church trustees and deacons.)
Grave markers for the Davis family predominate here and it’s not clear why (yet). “You know that is a mystery,” Monroe said. Many local families chose to bury their loved ones at Westview Cemetery while the Davises were still using Little Petersburg. But there are other such sites, small graveyards and family cemeteries, on properties close by.
Little Petersburg Cemetery isn’t an anomaly or a curiosity, for the area or the region. There are thousands of such defunct African American cemeteries across the South—and up north. They are opportunities, history-rich sites waiting to be reclaimed.
