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…