Old City Cemetery (Lynchburg, Virginia)

Shonagh recommends this site: “If anyone is heading toward Lynchburg, Virginia, there is a great cemetery to visit. It has a huge civil war section, not to mention one German soldier from World War Two. Also right in the cemetery are two small museums. One is a pest house and medical musuem from the Civil War. It is really interesting to see how medicine advanced. then then other is simply a museum chronicling how people were buried in the 19th Century. There are two great things in this museum: a horse-drawn hearse all clad in black. It is open. We have a picture of my mom laying in the back. The second is a wicker casket. That fascinated me, seeing as that anything left outside for a day in Lynchburg instantly rots. I am guessing that wicker caskets weren’t popular. Anyway, it is one of the best cemeteries I have ever been to.”

William13 has additional information to offer: “I had the opportunity to visit the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia. A beautifully maintained cemetery dating from the golden age, it boasts a sizable contigent of Confederate dead, a renowned collection of rose bushes as well as a pond and ‘scattering’ garden for the ashes of the cremated. But most exciting was the ‘Pest House’ where the poor sufferers of smallpox were treated during the great smallpox epidemic of 1862 – 1864. One could almost hear the desperate groans of the blighted souls as the doctor and nurses coated their rotting flesh with various balms and unguents.”