The green space in the 800 block of Green Street was originally part of the large estate of Dr. Nathaniel Terry Green. Dr. Green was a native of Halifax County, born on the 10th of March 1800, the seventh of eight children born to Captain Berryman Green and Nancy Terry Green. He married Anne Colquehoun in 1818, and the couple had ten children. Dr. Green came to Danville at an early age and studied medicine under the elder Dr. Paxton and taught school under Levi Holbrook at the Danville Male Academy. He later went to Philadelphia to obtain a formal medical training and returned to Danville to practice medicine with Dr. Patton.

The seat of the Green estate, Dr. Green’s family home, was located on the block of Jefferson Avenue between Colquehoun and Lee Streets, later addressed as 653 Jefferson Avenue (Street). When he prepared his will in March of 1860, he left his house and 20 acres of land to his living, unmarried daughters, Maria, Julia, and Sarah. Dr. Green died just months before the opening of the Civil War and could not have imagined what secession and hardship was in store for his family or his estate.

According to Karen Lynn Byrne in her master’s thesis on Danville’s Civil War Prisons, which she wrote in 1993 for Virginia Polytechnic Institute,  by 1863 this “unique” and “exceedingly attractive city” “presented an appearance of general desolation. ”The price of food had skyrocketed. Butter, which had sold for 20¢ before the war rose to $3.00 per pound by 1863. Potatoes went from $1.37 a bushel to $6.00. And those were the prices for items that could be got. Coffee disappeared, and flour became so scarce it was auctioned off by the ounce.

As we discussed in a previous article on Danville’s Civil War Prisons, Danville’s native population during this time dwindled, refugees—mostly women and children—from the embattled regions of Virginia, from the coast and the environs to the North, flooded into the town, swelling the population to 6,000. The lack of housing reached a crisis level when hotels and boarding houses ceased to have vacancies. Local families opened their homes to strangers so that, “every house was filled to the limit of its capacity.” These new inhabitants did not add to the labor force, and instead placed an additional burden upon the city’s waning resources.

That strain would only be made greater when, in May of 1862, the Confederacy established a military hospital in Danville on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Loyal Street. Whether that hospital occupied a building that was standing already (that of the Danville Female Academy, perhaps) or on an empty lot nearby, it is difficult to say. Regardless, the resources such a facility required for the treatment of its sick and injured (both Confederate and Union alike) were difficult, if not impossible, to come by, and these wounded soldiers arrived in Danville more to suffer and die than to recuperate. These deaths required burial, and with the arrival of Union prisoners in 1863 and, with them, the disease and illness they brought, the city was soon desperate for green space on which to bury these men. What other purpose the city had for wishing to purchase 35 acres of the Green estate is open to speculation. The Green home site became Green Hill and Freedman’s Cemeteries, but a portion of that property was also set aside as permanent green space.

On the Beers map of 1877, that green space is identified as the “Grove” but soon became known as Green Street Park.

Since its establishment, Green Street Park has vacillated between a garden of recreation and community harmony and one of violence and desolation. The Park’s earliest recorded episode of violence occurred in July of 1907 when

***This story is developing. Watch your inbox for the October 2024 edition of the Gazette for the full story.