Granddaughter’s call helps identify one of Norfolk Botanical Garden’s original Black workers
By Anthony Sabella
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NORFOLK, Virginia (WTKR) — A voicemail changed everything.
After News 3’s February report on Norfolk Botanical Garden’s decades-long effort to identify the 220 African Americans who cleared the land for the garden 90 years ago, a woman named Barbara Rice left a message.
“I was watching the news this morning as I normally do. I saw your story about the Azalea Gardens and the Black ladies that worked there,” Rice said in the voicemail. “I don’t know if you have my grandmother’s name or not, but I do know that she was one of the ladies that worked there.”
Her grandmother’s name was Marie Freeman Davis Boyd — a woman Rice called Big Mama.
“We would sit down at the dining room table. She taught me to embroider, she taught me to sew. We’d do puzzles sometimes,” Rice said when News 3’s Anthony Sabella recently spoke with her home in Virginia Beach. “This is the Big Mama that I know.”
Just like Big Mama shared her memories around the dining room table, Rice shared hers — and the only two photos of Big Mama she could find — around her table.
“She always talked about she only had a 5th grade education,” Rice said.
That lack of education left Boyd with few job options at the end of the Great Depression.
In 1938, Norfolk’s Works Progress Administration hired 200 Black women and 20 Black men to clear 25 acres of trees, brush, and swamp for the city’s Azalea Garden — now Norfolk Botanical Garden.
The work paid 25 cents an hour.
“They got picked up in a truck. You had to bring your own food,” Rice said she learned from her grandmother. “There was no bathrooms for the ladies there. I remember Big Mama talking about the snakes — that was why they had those thick rubber galoshes. She said it was terrible.”
Despite the conditions, it was a job.
Rice says the story was passed around her family, inspiring them to reach for more — until it faded into a distant memory.
Then came February.
“They were trying to find the ladies that helped build the botanical gardens and I was like, Big Mama told me those stories, she did that,” Rice said of seeing the News 3 segment.
Historian Martha McClenny Williams has spent more than 20 years trying to identify who she calls the “Original Gardeners.” The last known living WPA worker of Norfolk Azalea Garden, Mary Elizabeth Ferguson, died in 2017.
Williams records information from family members in her notebooks. Of the 220 workers, she has only been able to recover 75 or so names.
“There were no records kept, no names, nothing,” Helen Ferguson Williams, Mary Elizabeth Ferguson’s daughter, told News 3 in February. “The only thing we can rely on now is if their descendants can tell us.”
When Rice called the garden, the verification process began.
“It always begins with a telephone interview,” Martha McClenny Williams said.
That interview is followed by a handful of questions.
“Number one, the person must have been born somewhere between 1884 and 1922,” Williams said. “They must have lived in the city of Norfolk where they could have been picked up. Also, I want to hear some stories.”
Those stories must match what Williams knows about the garden’s construction and working conditions.
She says two months ago, she determined one name met the criteria.
“Marie Freeman Davis Boyd,” Williams said.
When asked how exciting it is to add a name, Williams did not hesitate.
“It is very exciting,” she said.
The recognition is complicated for many, McClenny Williams says, for the same reason it has been hard to get people to come forward.
“The work that they did in the garden did not give them a sense of pride,” Williams said.
Segregation laws also meant the people who built the garden were not allowed inside until the 1960s. Rice says her grandmother passed around 1961 and did not live long enough to see it.
“But I know she’d be pleased,” Rice said.
In September, Norfolk Botanical Garden will host its annual celebration of the WPA workers around the statue dedicated to them. Marie Freeman Davis Boyd’s name will be honored along around 75 others and Rice says she and her family will be there to celebrate their Big Mama.
“[Her descendants] are gonna be able to see this and know their grandma was somebody special, not just to us, but look at what she did and the adversities that she went through to do this so that we could be here now,” Rice said.
McClenny Williams says she’s also currently vetting two other names, but has not yet confirmed whether they were part of the Azalea Garden project.
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