A long closed mechanic’s shop sits on a hilltop at 5th and Hospital streets north of Downtown — just a stone’s thrown from the handsome, historic and well-tended private Hebrew and public Shockoe Hill cemeteries.

Hundreds of motorists and city buses pass the intersection daily, but few, if any, know that the once-thriving shop and car wash sit atop one of the largest public cemeteries for African-Americans — both free and enslaved — that the city established more than 200 years ago.

Long forgotten and off city maps, the Grave Yard for Free People of Colour and For Slaves opened in 1816 and became the burial ground for at least 22,000 people.

The Grave Yard replaced the original public burial site forAfrican-Americans at 15th and Broad streets, which also was forgotten until its rediscovery in the 1990s.

The city government initially set aside 1 acre for the burial of slaves and 1 acre for free African-Americans, many of whom preferred the private cemetery that a burial society established in Barton Heights a year earlier.

Over time, the Grave Yard was expanded to nestle two nearby creeks, Bacon Quarter Branch and Shockoe, both of which have run invisibly through underground pipes since World War I.

The Grave Yard also expanded west into land that 5th Street covers and to a section of property behind the white Richmond Alms House on Hospital Street, now senior apartments. The Colored Alms House, long ago demolished, sat on 5th Street beside Shockoe Hill Cemetery, and some residents also were buried on its grounds.

While it operated, there is evidence the Grave Yard became a favorite place for thieves to secure bodies needed by the Medical College of Virginia to train physicians before the state ban on human dissection was lifted. The majority of people buried there were poor.

The burial ground, renamed Potters Field after the Civil War, stopped being listed on city maps produced after 1905. But city leaders and most of the population appear to have forgotten the Grave Yard after it was quietly closed in 1879. Other public cemeteries replaced it, primarily the city’s largely forgotten Oakwood Colored and Colored Paupers cemeteries in the East End. They were developed across from the city’s then whites-only Oakwood Cemetery on land abutting the private, historic African-American Evergreen and East End cemeteries, which date to the 1890s.

Evidence of the collective community and government amnesia about the Grave Yard can be found in City Council’s approval of the city’s sale of portions for private development. The government also let railroad tracks run through it and authorized the state government to install in it the pillars holding up the elevated Interstate 64.

The memory of this African-American burial ground was so quickly erased that no one could explain the skeletons that turned up during the improvement of 5th Street in the1880s, the construction of a bridge or viaduct over Shockoe Valley to link Highland Park and Downtown in the 1890s and the development of industry sites.