Lee Park
The Accidental Sanctuary
The 1920s and 1930s saw an increased interest in the native wildflowers and their preservation, and the Lee Park Wildflower and Bird Sanctuary emerged against this background. Contrary to the traditional understanding of a sanctuary—preservation of the existing landscape—the Lee Park Sanctuary was created almost artificially. The workers gathered plants from the surrounding municipal lands and transplanted massive numbers of them to the nature preserve. The preserve actually had to be created afresh, before it could be preserved, curated, and maintained. There was no scientific plan or method behind the project, aside from the enthusiasm of the organizers and the hard labor of those who did the collecting and replanting of samples.
Approaches to wildflower conservation have changed considerably since the 1930s. Preserving original habitats is far preferable to transplanting, and such practices as raking the grounds and planting en masse for visual effect have been repudiated.
The peaceful preserve looked “deceptively natural,” as a local newspaper opined, and quickly gained popularity, drawing tourists and gardeners from inside and outside Virginia. Due to its success, the Lee Park Sanctuary became a prototype for four similar WPA wildflower and bird sanctuaries in Virginia, located in Charlottesville, Norfolk, Hopewell, and Danville.
The botanical illustrations and corresponding herbarium specimens are grouped according to the four main habitats that existed when the sanctuary was created. This includes open upland, forested upland, open bottomland, and forested bottomland.
Creating Lee Park
The Lee Memorial Park Wildflower and Bird Sanctuary project pursued several goals: to create jobs, to preserve native flora and fauna, to beautify a community park, and to develop an outdoor classroom where children and adults could learn about native plants and birds.
Mary Donald Claiborne Holden, an avid horticulturist and a member of the Petersburg Garden Club, supervised the project. Under Holden’s direction, women, Black in their majority, worked to clear paths and build trails; transplanted flowers, shrubs, and trees; and gathered specimens of plants in the park.
These unemployed women, as well as single women who were head of households, were given jobs to clear ravines, build more than 10 miles of paths, and plant more than 1 million honeysuckle roots to control erosion. It was back-breaking work moving downed trees, clearing the underbrush, planting, building structures, and constructing bridges and benches.
The women also transplanted more than 365,000 plants, shrubs, and trees into the preserve. The project report stated: “Almost every flower and shrub common to Virginia has been brought in.” They labeled 500 different kinds of plants with both common and botanical names and Holden, with the help of the other women, collected, pressed and dried plant specimens for educational purposes. This resulted in the 325 pressed plant specimens from Lee Park, some of which are on display here today.
The WPA and the New Deal
Aside from a few group photos taken on site, we do not have any images or records of the many women of color who made the creation of the Sanctuary possible. During the five years of federal funding, the Sanctuary employed hundreds of women, often for short periods of time. As with most WPA projects, there was a fair amount of turnover in Lee Park.
The fact that women were the driving force behind this project is remarkable when, at the time, the typical WPA worker was “a white man, thirty-eight years of age and the head of a household.”
Throughout the 1930s, the primary form of WPA women’s work consisted of the sewing rooms. However, sewing projects were segregated by race. In the South especially, local WPA administrators often pushed women of color out of the sewing rooms and into arduous landscaping and field work. As one WPA field investigator reported on the conditions in the South, “It has been charged that Negro women have been compelled to work at ‘men’s jobs’ in all kinds of weather.” A South Carolina observer reported to Washington the following: “The negro women of the beautification project have been treated disgraceful. They have been compelled to use picks, shovels, and wheel-barrows. They also are expected to dig holes from three to four feet deep and set out water oaks in the streets. They also load trucks with dirt.”
Mary Bell Focie, who worked on erosion control in the park, described the daily hardship women faced: “There was nothing there but dirt before. …. The honeysuckle planting was particularly strenuous, and sometimes it got very cold. For many years afterward, I didn’t want to hear the name Lee’s Park, because it reminded me of freezing with a shovel in our hands.”