As we come to the end of another summer, we are very thankful for a wonderful season. We thank all of our supporters and visitors who came out to visit doing the horrific heat, especially back in June when we helped sponsor our now annual Columbia Pike History Walk in collaboration with Walk Arlington.
We had a nice crowd, however, when the history walkers got to our Museum, they discovered our A/C was not working. Many stuck around anyway and enjoyed nice conversations and a cold beverage. Special thanks to Mary Dallao (Walk Arlington) for all she does and and Craig Syphax.
Remembering Salina Gray
COLEMAN CEMETERY has seen better days. All around are signs of disrepair and neglect-toppled and sinking headstones, overgrown weeds and fading inscriptions. Most passersby probably never give it a second glance. Yet this modest graveyard a few miles from Mount Vernon might be the final resting place of one of Arlington’s most historic figures: Selina Gray.
Born into slavery in 1823, Gray was the personal maid to Mary Custis Lee (wife of Robert E. Lee) at Arlington House, the mansion that now stands at the center of Arlington National Cemetery. Before the Lees fled at the outbreak of the Civil War, they famously entrusted Gray with the keys to the property. When Union troops occupied the plantation in 1861, Gray is credited with saving heirlooms from George Washington, a relative on the Custis side, including fine china and art.
Gray, whom the Lee and Custis families had taught to read and write (despite it being against Virginia law at the time), would later remark on the estate’s transformation in a post-war letter to Mary. “Now everywhere around it looks beautiful,” she wrote.
“The place is changed, so you would hardly know it.”
Gray and her husband, Thornton, were two of the nearly 200 people h. enslaved at Arlington House. In recent years, the National Park Service, which operates the mansion as a historic site, has centered its focus on the stories
of Arlington’s enslaved people, including interpreting the two-room quarters where the Grays lived and raised their eight children. What isn’t mentioned is where they are buried—probably because no one knows for sure.
After the war, the Grays purchased 10 acres in Green Valley, where they lived out their days farming and selling produce in downtown Washington, D.C.
Sources indicate that both Selina and Thornton died around 1907 and were initially buried along Columbia Pike in a graveyard associated with a chapter of the Odd Fellows (a fraternal order popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries), somewhere near the current Freedmans Village Bridge.
At some point, however, several burials, including Gray descendants, were reinterred at Coleman to make way for construction. Most of those records have been lost.
Today, Coleman Cemetery includes a headstone marked for Thornton and
“Salena,” as well as an inscription that says, “Erected by their daughter Sarah G. Wilson.” No dates are included, and no burial record exists.
It’s certainly possible this marks the final resting place of Selina Gray, but it’s also possible that this marker is merely a cenotaph—a memorial to their long and full lives.
Founder, Mrs. Evelyn Syphax Honored with New Marker
A new historical marker debuted on Sunday in Arlington, and it spotlights the legacy of our founder, Evelyn Reid Syphax.
Syphax began teaching in Arlington in 1951, that’s three years before Brown v. Board of Education. During her 20 years working in the public schools, she fought for desegration. She even founded Syphax Child Care Center in 1963 when she couldn’t find a preschool in segregated Northern Virginia that would accept her son.
As chairwoman of the Arlington County School Board, Syphax successfully overhauled the county’s desegregation plan in the 1970s’. The end result was a faster, shorter and more accessible bus ride for minority students. She also fought for programs to improve the reading, writing, and math skills of struggling students.
Outside of education, started a local chapter of the Coalition of 100 Black Women, organized scholarship and mentoring programs at a local Alpha Kappa Alpha, and was a driving force in creating the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington.
Enjoy the rest of your summer!!