Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum

It is rare for a historic house and garden to survive intact together. The Anne Spencer House & Garden is an exception. The documentation of Anne Spencer’s House & Garden highlights the garden’s significance to our history and chronicles its evolution from a home and gathering space to a nationally important cultural landscape.

Anne Spencer was a Harlem Renaissance poet, a teacher, a librarian, and a civil rights advocate who established the Lynchburg, VA chapter of the NAACP. Her garden was her sanctuary. It was where she wrote, and it inspired much of her poetry.

Spencer’s home and garden were a gathering place for luminaries like Langston Hughes, George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her garden still has a sculpture gifted to her by W.E.B. DuBois. The home and garden are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register.

Please see our incredible interviews with notable people, including, Brent Leggs, Executive Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; Dr. Kevin Young, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and Peggy Cornett, Curator of Plants at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.