A cemetery tour group examines a worn tombstone.
Albert Bowen died after accidently drinking poison.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star & Boynton Beach Historical Society
By Ron Hayes
It’s not the largest gravestone in Boynton Beach Memorial Park. Not the most elaborate. Not the most expensive.
But it is the earliest legible marker in the earliest part of the cemetery.
Albert J. Bowen
Sept. 16, 1865-Sept. 12, 1903
“And it’s one of the sadder stories,” Janet DeVries said. “When I saw that he’d died at only 37, I wanted to find out what had happened to him.”
On this last Saturday in October, a blue and breezy morning, DeVries, president of the Boynton Beach Historical Society, and her colleague Ginger Pedersen, its first vice president, led about 30 men and women on a “Weekend History Stroll” among the cemetery’s oldest graves.
“In 1900, there were only 83 people in the town,” Pedersen began, “but as they died, of course, they realized they needed a cemetery.”
The land, donated by Henry M. Flagler, was a small square of piney woods at what is now the southwest corner of Seacrest Boulevard and Woolbright Road.
Thomas E. Woolbright (1875-1953), who came down from Centralia, Ill., and got rich planting pineapples, is resting not 200 feet from the road that bears his name.
“There used to be big trees shading the graves,” Pedersen explained, “but they were lost to a hurricane, and in the 1950s the cemetery banned upright markers.”
Over here most of the stones stand. Some tilt, some are windblown and hard to read, but they stand. Look to the southwest and the land, once a pine forest behind these markers, is a vast expanse of flat ground markers. This morning, two tents are waiting for funerals over there, but here there will be no more burials. These are the pioneers.
Here lies the town’s first doctor, who came in 1925.
Nathaniel Weems
1898-1978
“He delivered me!” one of the women tagging along called out.
“Me, too!”
And beside him, Dr. Weems’ son, a tiny stone for a tiny life.
Oct. 13, 1928 — Oct. 14, 1928
Here’s Frank Austin (1857-1927), who opened the town’s first feed store.
And Walter Lyman (1891-1967), the first man to navigate the new Boynton Inlet in 1927. The original Lyman home of the 1880s is now Lantana’s Old Key Lime House restaurant.
Clara White (1872-1959) was paid $2 a month to run the town library and later wrote “Boynton Happenings” for the Boynton News and Palm Beach Post.
Somewhere around here lies Katie Andrews, whose family didn’t mark her grave.
“She married a Confederate war veteran from Milledgeville, Ga., named Charles Andrews, who was about 60 years older than her,” Pedersen revealed. “Of course, the U.S. government didn’t give pensions to Confederate vets, but at that time the state of Florida did, and when she died in 1971, she was still getting $15 or $20 a month.”
At the very northeast edge of the cemetery, almost to the sidewalk, you’ll find Diana Coldbrook. Her stone is nearly illegible, weather-worn and tilting. The carving is amateurish, the Cold broken on one line, brook on the next.
A domestic, born in the Bahamas in 1898, she died here in 1930.
“The Works Progress Administration survey and the genealogical survey of Palm Beach County indicated that the west half of the old section was for African-Americans and the east half for whites,” DeVries said. “But we noticed that the markers on the east side were mostly homemade folk markers and several said ‘Asleep In Jesus,’ which was common in African-American culture.”
And now we have reached Albert J. Bowen, who died on Sept. 12, 1903, at 37 — the oldest legible grave in the oldest corner of the cemetery.
After a search, DeVries happened on the Aug. 22, 1903, edition of Guy Metcalf’s Tropical Sun newspaper, and found a headline: “Took Strychnine and Died in Agony: Tragic End of A.J. Bowen, of Boynton.”
Born in Canada, he and his wife, Flora, came to Florida in late 1900 or so, and he found work as truck farmer. The couple and their two children lived in Joseph Freedlund’s boarding house.
On Sept. 12, 1903, Bowen returned from the fields feeling tired and sore and drank what he thought was a dose of quinine.
It wasn’t.
Beneath his name and dates on the marker is a line by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell: “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”
“And now we do remember him,” DeVries told the men and women gathered before his grave, “and he is not forgotten.”
The next Weekend History Stroll will visit the Richard & Pat Johnson History Museum at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County starting at 10 a.m. Nov. 8.
The 90-minute tour is free, but participants are urged to sign up in advance by calling 327-4690.
The museum is at 300 N. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach, across from the Palm Beach County Courthouse.
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