Stone Pyramid at Forest Hill Park

There is a discussion on the Woodland Heights yahoo group that I wanted to offer up to the community at large in search for an answer.

The pyramid is located in the old azalea garden, opposite Roanoke St. and is overgrown with vegetation.

One theory floating around on WHYG is that it marks the grave of Holden Rhodes who built the Stone House but what limited evidence there is points to a burial plot over by and perhaps under the current maintenance yard.  JP found and shared this tidbit, “Volume 118 of Cases decided by the Supreme Court of Appeals Virginia, 1916 (Google Books). In this volume there is a case (Bradley v. Virginia Railroad & Power Co) in which descendants charge they have the right to a burial plot on the park grounds (for commercial use it appears!). I did not pour over the case, but there is also mention of an adjacent servants plot that was reserved, but never used.”

Theory two presented by Stephanie is that it was built by WPA crews that did the stonework throughout the Park.

Monica Rumsey Past president and founding member Friends of Forest Hill Park sent out the email below:

“Friends of Forest Hill Park did some extensive research in the course of publishing its “Illustrated History of Forest Hill Park,” and followed standard scholarly procedure by publishing facts about the park proper that were backed up with reliable sources.

This was the case with two lingering questions about the park: Where was Holden Rhodes buried, if the entire estate was later turned into an amusement park? And what is the meaning or history of the stone pyramid that sits on a hill above the south end of the lake, an area that was once the old Azalea Garden (opposite Brookside Ave)?

Holden Rhodes’s Burial Site:
Friends of Forest Hill Park searched deed records for the park, and only found one mention of a cemetery, in that there was a consideration to allow heirs to visit the cemetery on site. But it did not say where that cemetery was.

The newspaper article by David Pulliam (“The Rhodes House,” Richmond News, November 10, 1900, p 3), cited in our history of Forest Hill Park does indicate that Holden Rhodes was buried “east of the mansion-house, near the brink of the hill that overlooks the rustic lake.” That could be what is now the equipment yard surrounded by chain-link fencing, just next to the tennis courts.

Along the edge of that equipment yard, there is a line of cedar trees that may be the cedar trees mentioned in some unpublished notes by the late Benjamin B. Weisiger III (author of the “Old Manchester” book), in connection to the slave graveyard. Weisiger stated: “As children we used to climb the cliffs created [by] the quarry. On the brow of the hill above the cliffs was a grove of cedars with a few field stones in the ground under them. I was always told this was the slave graveyard.”

If both Pulliam and Weisiger are correct, then both Holden Rhodes and the slaves who worked at Boscobel were once buried in the park equipment yard.

The only way to find out might be to get ground-penetrating radar to scan the yard to see if there might have once been burial sites there. An expensive proposition, but perhaps worth pursuing.

Stone Pyramid:
Our author (Lynn George) and researcher (Valerie Ashley) searched libraries, archives, and Parks Department records and could find no information about the stone pyramid.

One park staffer suggested it might simply have been built to get rid of leftover stones when the stonemasons finished building the park walkways in the 1930s.

I have another idea: maybe Holden Rhodes and his slaves were reburied on that hill when the city took over the former amusement park and turned it into a public greenspace. Since pyramids signify burial sites, perhaps they are all buried under that pyramid.

Who knows?