Peake Family Cemetery

Long rumored to have been a slave cemetery, this burial ground became the final resting place of several white and black residents of Gum Springs. In 1762, Humphrey Peake inherited three slaves—Caesar, Ben, and Allee—a mare named Flower, five leather chairs, a silk rug, and 150 acres on Little Hunting Creek from the estate of his father, William Peake. William Peake and Augustine Washington, George Washington's father, served together as vestrymen of Truro Parish. Humphrey Peake maintained his family's long friendship with their Mount Vernon neighbors until his death, and he was buried here in 1785, followed by his son William in 1793, his niece Kitty Adams in 1797, and his wife Mary Stonestreet Peake in 1805. Two graves here belong to heirs of West Ford, who as a child was enslaved at Mount Vernon. Freed in 1805, Ford received 160 acres of marshland after Bushrod Washington, the general's nephew, died in 1829. Four years later, West Ford sold that property to buy another 214 acres at Gum Springs. By 1880, 12 families of freed blacks and Ford descendants lived in the community. Among them, the farmer William Dandridge Smith and his wife Annie, a schoolteacher, owned a six-room house and a 14-acre lot and together may have earned 600 dollars a year. Dandridge Smith was buried in this cemetery in 1906, and Annie Smith was buried near him in 1907. The three remaining headstones mark the graves of Elizabeth Clements, Edith Anderson, and Emily Alexander, who were interred here between 1825 and 1884; their kinship to the Ford family is unknown.

Hybla Valley, Virginia · United States