There are two large, public cemeteries in Charlottesville: Maplewood and Oakwood. Maplewood contains hundreds of burials; it was established in 1827 or 1829 by the city of Charlottesville. Several African American families have plots in Maplewood. There are also a handful of slaves buried adjacent to family plots. For example, the photos at the left illustrates a gravestone for "Hagar." The inscription reads "faithful servant." She is buried in the Meade family plot, suggesting that she worked for that family. Unfortunately, her stone does not include a date.

Maplewood is a very large cemetery, the database here contains records for only a small fraction of the gravestones. This is one of only two cemeteries in the database (along with Oakwood) where an entire section was sampled, with both white and black burials. This was done because there was no easy way to locate African-American graves within the cemetery. So instead of looking at each stone and trying to determine whether the individual was African American, we decided to sample a larger area. If you are searching for African Americans in this cemetery, they will be noted in the burial list as "AfAm."