Old City Cemetery (Lynchburg, Virginia)
The Old City Cemetery is a historic cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia. It is the oldest municipal (city-owned) cemetery still in use today in the state of Virginia, and one of the oldest such burial grounds in the United States. Since the 1990s it has been operated as a history park and arboretum, in addition to being an active cemetery. The exact number of interments in Old City Cemetery is unknown because of a lack of official records before 1914, but it is estimated that 18,000–20,000 people are at final rest there. They represent an unusually diverse cross-section of the local community, including founding fathers and mothers of the town, Confederate soldiers who died in military hospitals, African American tobacco factory laborers, European immigrants, paupers, and "strangers" who died passing through town.