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 postwar letter to Mary. “Now everywhere around it looks beautiful,” she wrote. “The place is changed, so you wo[u]ld hardly know it.”
Gray and her husband, Thornton, were two of the nearly 200 people 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.