Category: Funeral Homes

The Kissimmee Pioneer Cemetery Failure- and the Oakland Cemetery in Haines City

On the 4th of July weekend we decided to set a day aside for adventure. We planned to drive to the Fort Kissimmee Pioneer Cemetery in Avon Park and see if we recognized any of the names from the other pioneer cemeteries we had visited. We are starting to remember names and the places where people settled and died from all of our visits this year, and this cemetery was supposed to be a good one. I also had a new camera to try out and I felt some excitement about that.

That vanished when we took what we believed was a shortcut and ended up in the middle of no damn where with nothing but orange groves all around. There was nothing- not even a gas station, for miles. Several times when we tried to get back on track we found our phones didn’t have a signal and so the only thing to do was keep going. By the time we found the place I was over it. I wanted a sandwich and an iced tea and a lot of fries. The cemetery resides on an old bombing range owned by the government, and when we pulled up and told them that we wanted to hike out to the cemetery the elderly gentleman running the booth said, “Well, what d’you want to go out there for?”

We just stared at him, because it was an actual wildlife preserve and DID in fact offer hiking, despite being government owned land.

He told us to drive forward for another half a mile until we got to building 600, and he handed us a shitty map. We turned the wrong way- corrected, and then found the building. I asked Shawn to go inside so I could sulk for a minute and try to get myself into a better mood. He came back out to the car and looked at me through the open window, his face blank.

“It’s ten bucks apiece to go in, and we have to go in this building and watch a video on safety since it used to be a bombing range.”

I rolled the window back up and waited for him to get in. By the time we passed the old guy at the gate we were laughing. We’d never worked so hard to go look at a bunch of tombstones, but after 3 hours in the car, we didn’t even want to. The person in building 600 had also mentioned that the entire cemetery is surrounded with a fence and a locked gate and that we couldn’t go in anyway, we could just kind of hang on the fence in the hundred degree heat and stare at it like the bad kids at the playground.

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We drove back toward Orlando taking a different route, and as soon as we got to Haines City we knew we needed to stop at Zaxby’s for fries and chicken fingers. While there we looked up local cemeteries to see what we could find, and there was one right down the road. We got back in the Jeep and decided to go to the smaller one, Oakland, and leave the larger one (Forest Hill) for the next time we were driving through.

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Oakland is a two part cemetery. A 2 lane road bisects it and one side is shiny new headstones and greener grass, the other side is older, well kept, but clearly more creative. That’s the side we decided to visit. The other side was also set up for a funeral service and we wanted to make ourselves scarce for that.

We got out at the back of the property and started walking through. It was hot, bleak, sandy, and didn’t have a speck of shade. There were some huge areas of nothing but ledger stones, and some good examples of handmade stones. Many of the graves were unmarked, and some were painted in bright colors. Many families had gone out with rope and had marked off their family plots themselves. It was a kind of do-it-yourself cemetery. Not particularly unusual. Not very old. Largely African-American and Hispanic families interred here.

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One side backed up to some houses nearby, and there was a field on the other side. The cemetery was not fenced and the road in front was the only entrance and exit.

Here is why these facts stand out- in 2009 a local funeral director dumped a body bag there full of organs from a client he had embalmed the same week. He said the organs were decomposing and he didn’t want them in the funeral home or with the body because of the smell. He left the man’s identification on the bag, and it was traced right back to his funeral home because he had performed his embalming and funeral services (minus the complete cavity embalming, apparently). After his arrest he said that he had been dumping organs there since 2000, but this was never able to be verified. The poor man who led to his arrest was actually buried in another cemetery- not in Oakland.

So many questions! First- why? Embalmers are trained to deal with these situations on a daily basis and most of them are damn good at it. There’s actually a lot they can do to combat smells in facilities and with bodies, so this is just unthinkable. Second- HOW? This cemetery has houses nearby, no fence, a busy road, and is clearly an active, maintained cemetery. There’s no privacy here. I have no idea how he was doing this. It was the most gruesome story I’ve run across while researching cemeteries.

On the way out I walked toward the front to get a photo of a sky-blue gravestone and heard a soft ticking noise nearby. It was consistent.

I looked around and finally found it; one grave was covered with solar activated toys and they were swinging and nodding away in the middle of the hot afternoon. There was no other movement anywhere.

And I totally forgot to use my new camera.

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Page-Jackson Cemetery and Deep Woods OFF

This is a cemetery that I would like to draw your attention to for several reasons.

  1. It’s historic. Many Sanford pioneers are here and the plot for Zora Neale- Hurston’s family may possibly be here, though Zora herself is buried in Ft. Pierce.
  2. It needs help from the community in order to be restored and preserved; it’s in danger of being lost to the woods and the clean-up for this site is overwhelming.
  3. It is chock-full of burials and monuments…but you can’t see them unless you have a good can of bug-spray and sturdy shoes.
  4. Because of it’s delicate condition and value as a historical resource, this cemetery has really stolen my heart.
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Shiloh Cemetery entrance.

I found this cemetery when researching the Evergreen Municipal Cemetery, which is made up of five different cemeteries that have bled together throughout the years, forming an enormous arterial network of graves and monuments. Four of the cemeteries include Shiloh (maintained by a church), Restlawn and Lakeview (maintained by the city of Sanford), and the odd child… Page Jackson (not maintained by any one except volunteers). I haven’t been to the fifth one yet but it’s in there somewhere.

The ground there is spongy from burials and sunken graves are everywhere, some of them up to a couple of feet deep. Some of the ground has been cleared by a group of volunteers, revealing old headstones, some handmade, and a ground littered with funeral home markers. Most are rusted but in good condition to read since they were filled out by hand in the days before the typed paper ones. These are on thin sheets of metal from Eichelberger Funeral Home in Sanford, most from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. Here is what I love about the markers- most are written in the same handwriting. One person had a very long career in funeral service. The funeral home is still servicing the community under the name Wilson-Eichelberger Mortuary.

Past the cleared area you start to notice headstones in the woods and you charge in out of curiosity (if you’re like me) or sit on the dirt road and squint into the woods in fear (if you happen to be cemetery phobic). Thankfully both of the people I went with aren’t scared of anything.

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In a family plot.

The woods are separated by the dirt road, and in another section of woods I started finding entire family plots, some with concrete barriers to mark the space, some with rusting chain still looped between poles. I’ve never seen another cemetery like it. I stayed on that side for awhile noticing that there seemed to be quite a few veterans graves, and there were also crime line notices posted all over the place. People were being encouraged to call if they noticed any suspicious activity – besides me and my friends walking through the woods in astonished silence. At one point the woods thinned and then ended abruptly in front of a huge trash pile and a large, flat field full of other graves, mostly with ledger stones rather than headstones. This was Shiloh Cemetery.

After being in the shady woods coming out into the bright field seemed surreal. The original cemetery gates were gone if they ever even existed, but the brick entrance was there and you could just make out the word ‘cemetery’ in faded white paint. The graves were painted bright colors or just left in plain concrete, and one had a man’s name spray painted onto the surface to serve as his marker. There were no dates, and on my second visit there were new burials sporting flowers with bright blue ribbons resting on top of the sandy soil.

Page Jackson is an African-American cemetery and is Sanford’s first black cemetery. Many of the graves are unmarked and in my reading I read that William Page-Jackson was a gravedigger at the cemetery and allowed people to bury their dead for free for many years. Eventually the place was called after him, because he was the resident authority over the space. He did what he wanted. In another account, I read that he was a farmer that had land that adjoined the cemetery, and it was named after him for that reason. I don’t know which account is true but I suspect it’s the second one.

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Handmade stones for Sarah King.

Meanwhile, this cemetery feels like it’s waiting to be found, like it has more stories to tell. People are looking for their family members and I know that one day when the space is finally cleared, there will likely be many more surprises awaiting volunteers and families. One surprise that I got while visiting was to find a team of paranormal investigators on the property with all of their equipment. The group leader described the cemetery as “friendly”. I loved that.

Currently 6 acres of the cemetery are not owned by the city, but the rest of Evergreen is. That means no maintenance from the city. It seems impossible in this day and age that these places can come to this kind of end, but it is surprisingly easy when you’re not really sure who owns the land or who has the right to work on it.

This cemetery has a history of vandalism and because of that police patrol the area on a regular basis, including at night. There is also a house on the property that is inhabited. (“My dream house!” I gleefully told Shawn. He laughed, but I could smell the fear.) If you visit this cemetery please walk carefully, don’t go in tick season, and put back anything you touch. Also, report any vandalism to the police, though it’s doubtful you will see anything with all of the activity in the area.

I picked a funeral home marker up off the ground that was handwritten and 58 years old, still perfectly legible. I put it back knowing that that was the only thing left to tell where Mr. Frank June was, and in a few years, no one will know anyway unless something is done for this place. The next time I visit I’m planning to just bring trash bags and fill them up. Every little bit helps and I don’t own a weed whacker or a chainsaw. And did you know that if you buy the dry version of Deep Woods OFF it will actually roll off of your skin in a powdery mess if you happen to accidentally touch any part of yourself after it’s applied? I didn’t either.

For more information about the cemetery and previous efforts at clean-up and restoration, you can visit this article from 2008.

Thanks to Keila and Shawn for the great photos!

 

The Sims Mausoleum at the Ocoee Cemetery

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The Sims Vault, Ocoee, Cemetery.

When you pull into the gates of the Ocoee Cemetery this monument looks like a giant blue turtle resting in a very colorful landscape. I’ve never seen one like it, the entire thing is constructed of blue tiles and it’s completely solid without even an air vent to mar its rounded appearance. There was some slight damage to the back where a few tiles have fallen off, and as I took a closer look I noticed the small eyes of a brown lizard looking back at me. It was a good hiding spot.

Otis Sims was a dentist in Ocoee and Winter Garden for many years, and his young daughter died at age 19, his wife following her five years later. His wife is called Stella C. on her grave marker, but in several records she was listed as Cena, so research was a bit complicated and there didn’t seem to be much information about them. In one funeral record it lists the vault as being made of brick, so perhaps at some later date the blue tile was added. Either way, it’s fancy and impressive. Fun fact- in 1918 and 1923 the engraved plates that cover the graves cost the family 5 dollars; it cost more for the masons to install them than it did for the engraved plates themselves. The one at the top of the mausoleum was $3.50.

I had expected this cemetery to be an older place with no recent burials, but it was a vibrant, often visited and perfectly maintained place; it was quite beautiful. The graves seemed to be loaded with brightly colored flowers and mementos, and when you stood at the front and looked at the whole thing it was a landscape dotted with happy colors. According to the website there are no plots available, only places in the small, modern columbarium in the back of the property.

This is the oldest cemetery in Ocoee and has some beautiful stones and monuments, and also some tragic ones, including two mothers who are buried with their infants. Also, William Blakely, the jack-of-all-trades in this area from back in the day is buried here. His stone says that he was a pioneer, and indeed he was. In late 1800’s to early 1900’s he was the school principal, Postmaster, and Justice of the Peace for the city.  He’s under a huge oak tree in the back of the property and apparently he got one of the prettiest shady spots in the cemetery.

With that many jobs I’m sure death came as a much-needed break.

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The green Virgin Mary statue.

The best source of information on this location is your own 2 feet and a good pair of tennis shoes, there’s not a whole lot online unless you’re looking for ghost stories. There are also quite a few handmade markers and inscriptions here which are always worth seeing. My favorite tribute was a Virgin Mary statue painted bright acid green, standing on a piece of astro-turf, and with a home-made metal cross behind her. Truly one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen in a cemetery.

 

Valentine’s Day and the Powder Blue Hearse

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The Huguenot Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida.

St. Augustine has always been a city that for me, feels a lot like New Orleans. The living and the dead seem to be in very close proximity, and it’s obvious. Not only are there cemeteries all over the place, but there is also a feeling there that I only seem to sense in old cities with a lot of turbulent history. It’s one of my favorite places.

This year Shawn and I were going to visit a cemetery a little farther out of town, not the usual ones that the tourists always go to. (Myself included. I love them all.) On the way, as we usually do, we got lost. Not too bad, but we turned the wrong way twice and ended up circling around the same few blocks three times until we were able to find the right road. Neither of us had been in this part of the city before and I hate getting lost, period.

On the first pass we saw a crab shack on the left hand side of the street that used to be an old gas station, and was a work of art. The windows and all of the signage were hand painted, and Shawn, who used to be a corporate chef, absolutely loved it. If they’d been open at 9 o’clock in the morning I felt sure that we would have been eating crabs with our Starbuck’s coffee.

On the second pass around the block we looked to the right and I noticed a funeral parlor, also closed, that was painted an incredible shade of powder blue. The first thing I thought of were the sheets on the guest bed at my mother’s house- those sheets were almost the same exact shade as this establishment.

On the third pass- and also the one where we found the road we needed to take, I noticed that next to the funeral home was a carport, and underneath it were parked two hearses, one traditional old one in dignified black, and one in metallic powder blue to match the funeral home.

Yes. It matched.

It was because of this that I made Shawn go around the block a fourth time and pull into the parking lot so that I could stare in wonder at the blue hearse for a few minutes.

“Go ahead and take a picture of it. I know you’re dying to,” he said, laughing at me.

“We’re on private property and I’d rather not trespass,” I said dejectedly. Doing the right thing can really suck sometimes, and I could think of younger days when I was a hell of a lot braver and might have tried to get behind the wheel of the thing.

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When we go back- we’re taking the hearse tour!

Then we noticed that in the back of the funeral home by the chain link fence that marked off the property there was an old, white hearse as well, probably from the 1970’s. I was beside myself with anguish over not being able to get a picture with it.

That night as we walked to dinner we saw a big, black, boxy hearse parked on the street next to one of the St. Augustine ghost attractions. I practically ran to it, dragging Shawn along behind me and making sure no one was nearby so I could pose next to it.

It wasn’t powder blue, but it was still awesome. I think the next time I’m in St. Augustine I might call up that funeral home and ask to do an interview with them on their history. That place really did look incredible and it certainly stood out. Style- that’s what it had.