A worker records a headstone during an inventory of the Delray Beach Memorial Gardens Municipal Cemetery in June. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
Survey maps graves and occupants, opening a new avenue into Delray’s history
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By Kathleen Kernicky
When Charlene Farrington discovers an unfamiliar name among the gravestones at Delray Beach Memorial Gardens Municipal Cemetery, she feels like she has found another piece of a century-old puzzle.
“To me, seeing the names on the graves is a validation that this person was here,” said Farrington, executive director of the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum in Delray Beach. “I feel like, ‘I’ve found you.’ I want to go back and research who they were. I want to know a little bit more. I feel good recounting their stories.”
Founded in 1903 on five acres donated by railroad baron Henry Flagler, the cemetery is the resting place of many of the city’s pioneer families, including political, civic and church leaders, business owners and educators, Bahamian settlers and civil rights activists. In those original five acres, they were buried in separate sections for Blacks and whites, reflecting the heavily segregated city of that time.
Over the years, the cemetery has expanded to 38 acres at 901 SW 10th St. The newer burial sections and a mausoleum remain a who’s who in Delray Beach history.
This year, a Historic Resource Survey project prepared for the city found that the original five-acre section is “potentially eligible” for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The recommendation is a first step toward receiving the honorary listing.
The city hired LG2 Environmental Solutions, Inc., to record and assess the condition of the historic graves and establish a written history for the original section. The survey documents and plots the location of graves using GPS devices, records cemetery features, and provides historical research, such as identifying the cemetery’s prominent residents.
The project received a total of $50,000 in grants from the state Division of Historical Resources and the federal Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the National Park Service.
The cemetery meets eligibility criteria for the national registry, in part, because of its “period of historic significance,” 1902 to 1974, when most of the burials took place, and a point in time that spanned two world wars, the Great Depression, the post-war era and Civil Rights movement.
In addition, there is a growing interest across the nation in preserving abandoned or neglected Black cemeteries, some dating back to the Civil War. The city cemetery stands as a living legacy of segregation in the first half of the 20th Century.
“Despite facing challenges such as hurricanes, flooding, and more modern additions, the cemetery still retains its original location, setting, feeling and association, preserving its integrity and conveying its historical significance,” the survey found, noting that the city-operated cemetery is well-maintained. Administered by the National Park Service, the National Register of Historic Places includes historic and archaeological properties such as buildings, structures or districts deemed worthy of preservation because of local, statewide or national significance.
Historic recognition of the cemetery would honor the people buried there and their contributions, promote heritage tourism and knowledge of the area’s history, said Michelle Hoyland, principal planner with the city’s Historic Preservation Division, who plans to make a presentation to the City Commission on Dec. 17.
Stories worth telling
“There’s a lot of opportunity to continue to tell the storytelling, something that gets lost in younger generations,” said Hoyland, who would like to see heritage conservation markers or information kiosks at the cemetery.
“You can see the distinction between where Black people are buried and where white people are buried,” Farrington said. “The tombstones are not as elaborate. A lot of the names are not clear or they’re missing altogether.”
Rows of raised concrete grave boxes denote where Black residents were reburied above ground after a 1947 hurricane submerged the cemetery and left caskets floating in four feet of flood water. The flooding knocked down or damaged an unknown number of stone markers.
“In those days, the caskets were not marked on the outside. They could only put them back where they came from,” said Michael Lorne, owner of the Lorne and Sons Funeral Home. Lorne’s father, Wilbur “Bill” Lorne, was part of the cleanup and reburials.
“The records were nothing like they are today,” Lorne said. “The farmers had the equipment to help dig and rebury the people in those graves. But they had to wait until the water receded. Those were very hard times. My father didn’t like to talk about it.”
Lorne heard many of the stories from his father, who was born and grew up in nearby Lake Worth. Bill Lorne worked at a now-defunct funeral home in Delray Beach before opening the family business now run by his sons Michael and Patrick in 1957.
“My father used to talk about the town’s first traffic light and what happened in the old days,” Lorne said. “He could go back through generations of families. Delray was a small, sleepy town. The people in that cemetery are pioneers. Just walk through there and see the names. Many have done so much for the area.”
Lorne likes to tell new clients about the families buried there. “Most people don’t realize what those names mean.”
Original was near beach
Known as Linton until 1898, the town named its first cemetery Bay Ridge. It was located on the barrier island between what is now Seaspray Avenue and Laing Street, and served as a burial site for shipwrecked sailors. To reach the cemetery from inland, caskets had to be loaded onto a wagon and pulled by barge across the canal, now known as the Intracoastal Waterway. Over time, graves were damaged by bears and the wooden boards used as grave markers were eroded by flooding and storms.
By 1903, the need for a proper burial site became the project of the city’s Ladies Improvement Association. Five acres of land was donated by the Florida East Coast Railway Company, owned by Flagler.
The city was heavily segregated, with separate churches, housing, businesses and schools. Black residents were turned away from the municipal beach. In exchange for their labor in clearing the five acres and building a narrow road to segregate the new cemetery, the Black community was given two acres for burials in the northeast corner. The original layout remains in place, including the road that segregated the cemetery before a single soul was buried there.
The women in the improvement association sold single plots for $1 and family plots for $5 to pay for the maintenance. The first recorded burial was a 12-year-old boy in June 1903.
A who’s who of Delray
In 1914, the improvement association turned over the cemetery to the city. Over the years, the cemetery expanded and added a mausoleum. In 1995, the official name was changed to Delray Beach Memorial Gardens Municipal Cemetery. Very few plots remain in the original section, Lorne said.
John Sundy, who was elected mayor in 1911 when what was then the town of Delray Beach was incorporated, is buried there with his wife, Elizabeth. The Sundy House, built in 1902, is listed on the national register. Catherine Strong, who died in 1963, was the city’s first female mayor, city clerk, and a civil rights activist who fought for the desegregation of the municipal beach.
Jessie Spady was the wife of Solomon David Spady, a prominent educator and principal of the first Black school, originally named the Delray Colored School Number 4. Charles
Spencer Pompey was an educator, coach and civil rights leader. Ozzie Youngblood was a civil rights leader who became the city’s first Black City Council member in 1968.
“It tells you how important cemeteries are to history,” said Kayleigh Howald, archivist at the Delray Beach Historical Society. “Cemeteries can tell us a lot. It tells you a little bit about who people were, or how they died, or if a lot of people died at once. It tells you how a town was segregated by race or wealth. It tells the story of a community.”
The headstones reveal what materials were available or used at the time. The symbols on the headstones offer clues about the culture, what was important to people at the time, or even how they viewed death, Howald said.
“This cemetery holds the final resting place of the people who built this town, who settled here, and who made a huge impact. It’s a vehicle by which you can tell their stories,” said Winnie Edwards, executive director of the Delray Beach Historical Society. Edwards’ family came to Delray Beach in the 1920s. Her great-grandfather Charles Harvey
Diggans owned a pharmacy on Atlantic Avenue and a real estate company. Her grandfather LeRoy Diggans was a postmaster and the first president of the city’s first chamber of commerce. Both are buried at the cemetery, along with her grandmother Winifred.
Today, the Spady museum includes the cemetery as a stop on its historic bus tours of the city.
“We talk about the early settlers, the prominent Black families in Delray Beach,” said Farrington, whose father and grandmother are buried in the cemetery’s mausoleum. Her mother, Vera Farrington, an educator, founded the Spady museum in 1996.
During the tours, Farrington encourages the children to call out the names on the gravestones. “It’s a good way to validate the stories we tell. I try to impress upon them the reverence that I feel by being there. You want to pay homage to them and honor their lives. They sacrificed a lot so that I could walk through the cemetery and tell their stories.”
More info
To review the city cemetery’s Historic Resource Survey and database, go to https://delraybeachfl.gov/regulationsandmaps
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