How a Depression-era work program is helping find lost cemeteries

TAMPA — A Depression-era report on the locations of veterans’ graves throughout the United States has been used to identify three sites that may turn out to be forgotten African-American cemeteries.

The report may take on added value if lawmakers pass a bill sponsored by state Sen. Janet Cruz, D-Tampa, creating a task force to find African-American cemeteries throughout Florida.

“It is an instance where the intent was to do one thing but it has been quite useful for another reason,” said Rodney Kite-Powell with the Tampa Bay History Center.

The federal Works Progress Administration was established to create employment at the height of the Great Depression.

“The government paid for those things that were needed, both practically and culturally,” Kite-Powell said.

The WPA funded construction of projects such as Tampa’s Peter O. Knight Airport on Davis Islands and St. Petersburg’s City Hall.

But it but also paid artists to paint murals, scholars to collect oral histories and researchers to compile what was called the Veterans Graves Registration Project.

The project was a state-by-state search for the location of military veterans’ graves.

Issued in 1941, the report lists each veteran’s name, military rank, war, birth and death date, and place of interment. It also provides detailed written directions to each cemetery.

African-American names are denoted with asterisks and their cemeteries are described as “colored.”

To show the research was thorough, the report also lists cemeteries where veterans were not interred.

“It became a cemetery directory,” Kite-Powell said.

A preface added to the report some years later says that “many of the cemeteries” listed, “especially the older ones in rural counties are now ‘lost.’”

Among those might be the Port Tampa Cemetery for African-Americans.

According to the WPA, you reached the cemetery by starting at the corner of Interbay Boulevard and Manhattan Avenue, heading south 884 feet, turning east and going 1,327 feet.

Those directions indicate it was on land that is today part of MacDill Air Force Base.

The history center’s Kite-Powell recently tipped the base to the possible existence of a cemetery there. The military will begin a search for it this month.

Two other cemeteries that may have been forgotten also appear on the WPA report — Keystone Memorial Park Cemetery for African-Americans on land that is now an Odessa horse ranch and the College Hill Cemetery for Cubans and African-Americans on what is now a vacant lot within the Italian Club Cemetery in Ybor City.

Read inspiring stories about ordinary lives

Subscribe to our free How They Lived newsletter

You’ll get a remembrance of Tampa Bay residents we’ve lost, including heartwarming and amusing details about their lives, every Tuesday.

Loading...

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

“It is a tremendous resource,” said Becky O’Sullivan of the Florida Public Archaeology Network. O’Sullivan used the report to locate the College Hill Cemetery.

Still, World War II intervened with the research so the resource is an incomplete one.

The project was halted by “America’s pre-war national mobilization," according to the preface.

What’s more, 15 of Florida’s 67 counties were not surveyed. Pinellas is among them.

And while Pasco made the cut, the report lists just one all-black burial ground there — titled simply Colored Cemetery and now known as the Old Trilby Colored Cemetery in Dade City.

“I doubt every African-American in Pasco was buried in that one cemetery,” O’Sullivan said.

The report also only documents cemeteries of the 1930s, so it does not include Ridgewood Cemetery in Tampa, a final resting place for indigent people from 1942-1954. Ridgewood recently was rediscovered on the southeast corner of Tampa’s King High School campus and ground penetrating radar confirmed graves there.

Nor does the WPA report list Zion Cemetery, an all-black cemetery established in 1901 and erased from public view in 1929. Radar has confirmed that bodies remain at Zion, where more than 800 people were buried and now the site of a public housing complex and warehouses.

The Tampa Bay Times first identified Zion’s location using old maps, city directories and news archives.

That same approach can be employed to find lost cemeteries not included in the WPA report, Kite-Powell said.

Some African-American neighborhoods in the early 1900s might have had their own cemeteries, he said.

“To find those, you’ll need to narrow that search.”

Old city directories place asterisks next to any building connected to African-Americans — homes, schools, churches and businesses, for example.

A concentration of asterisks in an area would indicate it was a black neighborhood.

“They might have had a cemetery,” Kite-Powell said. “Then we can look to maps or for oral histories to know for certain."