Green Hill Cemetery Historic District
486 E. Burke St., Martinsburg, WVGreen Hill is an 1854 cemetery designed by David Hunter Strother -- better known as Porte Crayon. Strother, who is buried here, worked with local surveyor John P. Kearfoot in translating a design he had sketched in Paris to a conical Virginia hill. A chapel, replaced in 1917-18 by a fine Neo-Classical Revival Mausoleum, originally capped the hill. Around this apex, simple pathways divide the hill vertically while circular drives create concentric terraces, close together at the top, and more relaxed at the bottom. Monuments make the area into an outstanding outdoor museum of the stone carvers and sculptors' art. Most local stone carvers are represented as such nationally known sculptors as A. Gaddes of Baltimore. All the Victorian symbols are here -- truncated columns, wilted roses, draped urns, the pointing finger, etc.
The 1901 caretakers lodge, designed by local builder/architect W. S. Small, is a superb shingle-style dwelling, and much of the ornate iron fence of the same era survives.
The area contains houses of various eras, from the mid-19th century brick and stone cottage at 475 East Burke, said to have served as a school, to ornate examples of the Victorian woodworker's art.
The Boyd-Lee-Herring House, 469 Teneno Street, a mid-19th century Greek Revival residence survives on the heights overlooking Chambersburg and the cemetery. The Buena Vista Brewers of the same era also survive, riveted into a hillside with magnificent brew cellars, springs, and storage areas in brick and stone with studded wood and wrought iron. The brewery stream still flows through fine open space.
Since the street was the main road to Shepherdstown, Harpers Ferry and then to Baltimore and Washington during the Civil War era, the district saw considerable Civil War activity and troop movement. Because of area heights and curvature of the topographically oriented road, the district offered both lookout points and picket stations.
The district is an open area of mainly mid-19th to turn of the century development. It still evidences the to-be town of Chambersburg, now swallowed up by Martinsburg and, from Green Hill, offers some of the best views of the present city and surrounding countryside.
To climb the Chambersburg and Green Hill heights is to understand why 19th-century settlers so valued the site and built it so well.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.