The Daughters of Zion Cemetery is named for the African American mutual aid society that purchased the land and established the cemetery in the city of Charlottesville in 1873. An alternative burying ground for blacks to the city’s segregated, mostly white municipal Oakwood Cemetery, Daughters of Zion Cemetery is one of the few sites in the city today directly linked to one of the Reconstruction-era aid societies. These societies played a vital role in developing black communities after the Civil War, in Charlottesville and elsewhere around Virginia. The period of significance for the Daughters of Zion Cemetery extends from 1873 to around 1933, when the Daughters of Zion disbanded and a majority of the two-acre cemetery’s 641 burials had occurred.