Hollywood Cemetery

Hollywood Cemetery opened in Richmond in 1847 as a garden cemetery designed by Philadelphia architect John Notman. Its hills and valleys followed a nineteenth-century idea that burial grounds could be landscaped as places of mourning and reflection. The setting above the James River became a civic landmark as Richmond expanded around it.

The cemetery’s history was altered by the Civil War. Richmond became the Confederate capital, and thousands of Confederate soldiers who died in the city’s hospitals were buried at Hollywood. A stone pyramid marks the graves of roughly 18,000 soldiers. The scale of that memorial is difficult to separate from the cause it commemorates: the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery, and the cemetery’s landscape reflects the choices made by those who organized its remembrance.