The Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery are the stewards of Richmond's oldest city-owned cemetery, and are dedicated to celebrating its history, restoring its beauty, and educating the public on its place in community life.

Organized in 2006 in to better promote and maintain the "burying ground" that served both Richmond's elite and indigent for much of the 19th century, the Friends began active stewardship with the support of the John Marshall Foundation and the City of Richmond. Together City and Friends helped restore damaged walls, tombstones and erected a State Historic marker. Volunteers, Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, church groups, "Hands On" Richmond volunteers and high school groups all helped clear debris. Family members and researchers began to arrive and in some cases adopted and repaired long forgotten family plot. Our first "Stroll through the Cemetery" program brought visitors and neighbors alike to the cemetery for tours centering on the notables from the American Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century.

What does this future look like? To be sure, it will be more than the just the celebration of a National Historic Landmark. Already there is the realization of all the other things this Cemetery represents: the largest green space north of the city, a working classroom, an arboretum, an art gallery and a sacred site for meditation. The Cemetery is also a common connection to the many individuals who shaped our history.

In 2010 the Friends will begin to build on this more expansive view of what Shockoe Hill Cemetery means. We will have regular programming geared toward adults and children. A workshop featuring a nationally-known restoration expert is being planned in which "best practices" for gravestone care, restoration and repair will be established. Databases of burials and gravestones will open new doors for research and genealogy. Exciting "theater nights" for the fall are being envisioned as a partnership project with a local museum. Interior restoration of the "Keeper's House" will allow visitors to enjoy regularly changing exhibits.

Shockoe Hill provides a peaceful setting for the gravesites of our longest-serving United States Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Marshall, and his wife Mary Willis Ambler Marshall. John Marshall was buried in the family plot in July of 1835. The cemetery, established in 1822, was the second municipal graveyard to be opened in Richmond when the grounds of St. John's Churchyard, the city's oldest cemetery, neared its capacity for internments.
Revolutionary War heroes such as Peter Francisco and Major James Gibbons, as well as Richmond's first mayor, Dr. William Foushee, are buried here. Many other notables such as Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew and Virginia Governor William H. Cabell are interred in the cemetery as well.