Holy Rood Cemetery

Holy Rood Cemetery is Holy Trinity Catholic Church's parish cemetery. It is located at 2126 Wisconsin Avenue N.W. at the southern end of Glover Park, adjacent to Georgetown in Washington, D.C. It is at one of the highest elevations in the city. The 6.5-acre cemetery contains approximately 7,000 burials, including the graves of European immigrants who built the C&O Canal and the City of Washington, along with Civil War veterans and others. At the western edge of the cemetery is the grave of Joseph Nevitt, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. As many as 1,000 free and enslaved African Americans are buried at Holy Rood, in what may be the best-documented slave burial ground in the District of Columbia. Originally called Trinity Church Upper Grave Yard, the burial ground was established by Holy Trinity Catholic Church in 1832. It was enlarged between 1850 and 1870, and renamed Holy Rood Cemetery. (Rood is an old English word for Cross) The cemetery was active from the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. The last cemetery lot was sold in 1915, and a few burials took place as late as the 1990s. The cemetery is closed for additional burials. Holy Rood Cemetery is owned by Georgetown University which founded Holy Trinity Catholic Church in 1787. In the 1980s, the university explored the possibility of disinterring the bodies buried there so the land cou

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