NORFOLK, Va. — Four new names were added to the list of workers who cleared land for Norfolk Botanical Garden during the site's 18th Heritage Day celebration Sunday — the most new names identified in a single year since 2018, according to the garden's historian.
The annual event honors the 200 Black women and 20 Black men hired by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to clear brush and trees for what was then called Norfolk Azalea Garden in 1938. Today, fewer than 80 of the 220 workers have been identified.
The garden has spent more than 20 years working to find out who they were.
Helen Ferguson, with Norfolk Botanical Garden's President's Council on Inclusion and Diversity, read the names of all known workers aloud during the ceremony. Her mother, Mary Elizabeth Ferguson, was the last known living worker before her death in 2017. A 2009 interview with the city of Norfolk captured the elder Ferguson describing the conditions.
"It was a lot of trees…it was marshy," Mary Elizabeth Ferguson said. "It was scary."
Helen Ferguson said the workers themselves felt differently about the job than those honoring them today.
"They were ashamed," Ferguson said. "It was embarrassing."
The work was dirty, grueling and included encounters with snakes as workers moved through the swamp. The workers would be picked up in a truck from their Norfolk residences and had to use the bathroom outside. Because the conditions were so harsh, the work fell to mostly Black women looking for money to feed their families at the end of the Great Depression.
When the work was done, segregation-era rules barred them from entering the garden they had built for decades. Many did not live to see that change.
"When I call their name out, I'm always honored," Ferguson said. "I don't want one person to be forgotten."
A story News 3 reported in February about the effort to identify more workers led Barbara Rice of Virginia Beach to come forward with information about her grandmother.
"(You) saying that anybody that had family members or knew somebody and [had information] to call and to contact you guys and that's what I did," Rice said.
After News 3 connected Rice with the garden's historian, Martha McClenny Williams, her grandmother Marie Freeman Davis Boyd — whom the family called "Big Mama" — was confirmed by the as one of "The Original Gardeners" in July. On Sunday, her name was read aloud at the ceremony — an acknowledgment nearly 90 years in the making.
"It's just a great thing for all of us. You see how many of us showed up so you see it's a great honor for us to let the world know about our grandma, our Big Mama," Rice said.
Rice's willingness to share her story prompted others to come forward. Among the four new names added this year were sisters Ruth and Margaret Jones, whose family contacted the garden after seeing Rice's interview with News 3.
"I saw the news story…I said, grandma used to work there in that garden. And I told my sister about it and my sister said, yes, she did. She used to work in the garden," said Ruth Jones' granddaughter Yolanda Coston-Perkins, adding that her sister told her Margaret worked there also.
"I'm glad they're being recognized. They built this on their blood, sweat, and tears. These women had to fight snakes," Ruth's great-grandson Jason Coston.
Shante'l Barringer's path to hearing her great-great-grandmother Susie Diggs Carney's read aloud began with stories she heard from her grandmother during an ancestry project at Hampton University.
"I came across the web page and saw that they were soliciting names and I was like, oh OK, well let me submit my great-great-grandmother's name," Barringer said. "It means a great deal and it gives another perspective to looking at the botanical garden. I've visited here on field trips, but now I'm looking at it completely different because there's a family tie there."
Work once considered shameful by those who performed it is now a source of deep pride for their descendants. But organizers say the effort will not be complete until every worker receives the recognition they deserve.
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