by Anthony DeMatteo
Staff Writer
On one side of Beach Boulevard, a statue of Jesus — its left arm broken at the wrist — opens its marble arms to an expansive landscape of graves at H. Warren Smith Cemetery.
Spanish moss hangs from trees, shading the manicured lawn.
Across the road is the Lee Kirkland Cemetery, which for decades provided the only land where black residents of Jacksonville Beach could be buried. Some residents say the austere graveyard, which sits on a little more than an acre, was once as large as the approximately 15-acre H. Warren Smith.
Now, two road projects squeezing Lee Kirkland’s borders are causing controversy in the community.
The City of Jacksonville Beach is altering the design of nearby Penman Road, making it into a continuous thoroughfare. The Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) is widening Beach Boulevard from four to six lanes. Construction equipment dominates the area.
And beneath that work, some residents claim bodies are buried.
Responding to claims that unmarked graves exist outside Lee Kirkland’s boundaries, JTA and the Florida Department of Transportation last fall hired Southeastern Archeological Research of Gainesville to study 44 images found by ground-penetrating radar in the earth, north of Lee Kirkland.
To determine if the areas contained graves, SAR used a technique to search for patterns of discoloration and texture changes that indicate previous digging.
It found Christmas lights and tin cans.
“What we found was that there was no evidence there had been any graves in the right-of-way, north of the cemetery fence line,” said Southeastern Archeological President, Dr. Anne Stokes.
Jacksonville Beach hired Jacksonville-based Florida Archeological Services to search about 10 locations in a vacant lot east of Lee Kirkland that is part of the Penman Road project. That search also found no human remains.
Stokes estimates her company dug about two meters into the earth, checking for graves and human bones.
SAR’s legal department did not release a copy of the project report before this story’s deadline.
“We’ve used this method on many other projects,” said Stokes. “There would have been an indication if a grave was there.”
Stokes said ground-penetrating radar does not reveal exact outlines of images it finds. Radar images of the areas her company searched, she said, did not resemble the outline of graves.
“None of ours had the outline of a grave, just kind of points,” she said.
Lee Kirkland was deeded to the City by residents J.T.G. and Paula Crawford in 1932.
“It’s been the same size for as long as we have records,” said Jacksonville Beach Assistant City Manager Roy Paxson. “I know there are some people who think it was much larger, but we have no information to support that.”
Tin cans or sacred ground?
Some say they know bodies lie outside Lee Kirkland because they attended burials there.
“I went to many funerals there,” said 83 year-old Jacksonville Beach resident Tiny Little.
The 1932 deed includes four parcels of land that add up to approximately 12 acres.
“The City sold off the other land and kept one parcel,” said Maxine Terrell, who leads PRIDE, a neighborhood group fighting for recognition of what members say are the unmarked graves. “People just don’t give you land. It was donated because it was a cemetery.”
Little said she recalls the configuration of the cemetery years ago.
“There was no fence or anything there but bushes and cemetery,” she said. “You know good and well, with that much land, somebody else is out there.”
But Paxson said the deed is not proof all the land given to the City was cemetery land.
“We have no proof that any of that was part of the cemetery,” he said. “I can’t vouch for what the city did 60, 70 or 80 years ago. We don’t have those records.”
Paxson estimated the Jacksonville company that searched the lot east of Lee Kirkland dug six feet looking for possible graves.
“The hard evidence we have after extensive effort is that this technology does not show anything there,” said Paxson.
Buildings, including a used car lot, stood for years on the property east of Lee Kirkland before it was cleared by the City to allow for the realignment of Penman Road.
“The cemetery was here before those buildings,” said Terrell. “Once the buildings came down, we didn’t want them to put anything there. We said, ‘Let’s look for the graves, show some respect.’”
According to Paxson, the City addressed that concern by bringing in the archaeological team.
“We wanted to make sure we checked the area out thoroughly before we moved any dirt,” he said. “We didn’t want to get in there and have the surprise that this is a cemetery. We wanted to handle it in a careful, respectful manner and we have done everything possible to look into it.”
He said the City has an archeologist on call in case the contractor finds anything that might be a grave.
Paxson said because church and City records of those buried inside the cemetery are sketchy, Jacksonville Beach also searched with radar inside the cemetery grounds for unmarked graves. There, he said, graves have been found and the city is working with local churches to identify those buried.
Terrell said the community asked the City to return the cemetery, claiming neglect, but was denied.
“We want to keep this as a tourist location so we can still tell their story,” she said of Lee Kirkland’s dead. “We won’t let them erase us from this beach.”
Workers at a local elementary school made white crosses last year to place on graves on Veteran’s Day. They now sit piled against the base of a tree inside the cemetery, hiding most of a small American flag. Terrell said she doesn’t know who removed them.
Moving ahead
Paxson said though he is sensitive to residents’ views on the issue, the project is progressing as planned.
“We checked those anomalies and found that it was just debris,” said Paxson. “We are moving ahead with the project.”
Though she said it seems like second-best, Terrell is resigned to the roads being built.
“We’re going to watch the project,” she said. “The law says if they find a grave, they have to stop. But nobody’s going to tell us if they find one. It’s like we’re settling. They know we don’t have the means to fight them.”
Little, whose oldest daughter is buried inside the cemetery walls, said people being interred without a marker through the years led to graves being steadily paved over.
“We had no marker, no vaults,” she said. “But that’s how it was. We couldn’t afford them.”
She and Terrell think that in one of the unmarked graves lies Rhoda Martin, who founded the first black elementary school in Jacksonville Beach. Terrell said Martin died in 1946 at the age of 116.
“I’ve seen a lot of changes,” said Little. “All the people who really have a history here, they’re gone. It’s just too bad something wasn’t done much earlier. Now, it looks like it’s too late.”