Plaque to honor the buried under South Daytona ballfields.
By Cindy F. Crawford
Staff Writer
SOUTH DAYTONA -- There's a spooky time of night, when most people don't like being outside alone.
It's around 2 a.m., when it's pitch dark and a layer of onerous fog hangs in the air.
P.J. Warner has been outside at that hour many times, lining the diamond of the ball fields at James Street Park in South Daytona to get it ready for his team's baseball game the next day.
The creepy conditions never freaked out the coach. After all, he was at a ballpark, the home of the All-American sport.
But his composure changed when he heard that underneath the park lay the remains of black settlers buried there in the late 1800s when the land was a cemetery called Pine Ridge.
The city of South Daytona built over the cemetery in the late 1960s after it lay abandoned and neglected for decades.
"That's kind of scary," said Warner, an area real estate agent and coach of 9- and 10-year-olds on the team called the Waves, which practices on the James Street fields twice a week. "That stuns me."
Few locals remember Pine Ridge Cemetery, which staged its last burial around 1899. Even longtime black residents like Sam Rogers say they've never heard of it. However, he's not surprised by its ultimate fate.
"This happens everywhere," Rogers said.
Worried that the residents resting underneath James Street Park would be forgotten, area historians Harold Cardwell and Kay Stanton asked South Daytona officials to honor them with a monument -- and the city agreed.
"It's one of those things that should be recognized," said Greg Bartholomew, parks and recreation director.
A plaque should go up in the next few months, perhaps at the entrance of the park, he said.
Building on top of a cemetery is "unacceptable" and should be regulated, said Dusty Smith, founder and president of the International Association of Cemetery Preservationists, a group of locals who clean up abandoned cemeteries.
"What if that was your grandparents or parents?" Smith said. "These people may have taught your kids or built your home. You may not have known them, but they were people who built this town."
It's unclear whether state laws would have prohibited the city from building on top of a cemetery in the 1960s, but it wouldn't be allowed today, said Tim Wheaton, an analyst for the state's Division of Funeral, Cemetery and Consumer Services.
"No one is supposed to disturb graves without proper authority, and if they do have permission, they shouldn't build there," Wheaton said.
Even though today's tighter laws don't allow construction over graves, the state does not regulate cemeteries owned by governments, which often end up taking over abandoned cemeteries and their care, he said. State officials step in if a complaint is filed with local law enforcement or the State Attorney's Office.
It's not unusual for a cemetery to get lost over time, said Bill Morgan, a volunteer county coordinator for USGenWeb, a private genealogy Internet site where he has posted information about many old cemeteries in the county.
Relatives move away and lose track of their ancestors' resting places. Cemetery lands get sold, and new property owners stop caring for them. In some cases, Morgan has seen headstones used for footstones around properties and for the foundations of homes.
Historic black cemeteries often meet a more unfortunate fate, Morgan said. Because black families in the early days couldn't afford headstones, many used wooden crosses and pine boxes, which rot easily and leave no physical sign of the graveyards' existence.
That's what happened to the graves of black settlers of Freemanville in Port Orange.
Historians believe settlers who moved from South Carolina to work at a sawmill that never materialized and later made a living farming were buried somewhere within the tiny settlement off U.S. 1, but they aren't sure exactly where. Alberta McCloud, 81, who has lived in the area for decades, and other residents think they know where it is -- in a heavily wooded area on the corner of Ocean and Orange avenues.
Historian Cardwell believes Pine Ridge Cemetery holds the remains of workers on the railroad, which was built in the 1880s, but few locals know much about them.
City Manager Joe Yarbrough, who has been on the job for 20 years, said he first heard about it 10 years ago when a News-Journal reporter was doing a story about lost cemeteries.
South Daytona records show the city took it over in 1966 when the City Council declared the graveyard so mistreated and neglected that it had lost its identity as a burial ground and would be better off as a public park. The stones and monuments there had been destroyed and the graves had worn away, records show.
Putting a monument at James Street Park would be a nice gesture, baseball Coach Warner said, but it could upset some parents and kids.
It didn't sit well with Waves player Kyle Marsh, 10.
"We're playing on dead people?" he asked with a crossed brow.
But Warner doesn't believe the fields are haunted. Over the years, his league has had nothing but luck, winning many major tournaments and even state championships.
"Maybe they're looking over us," Warner said.
Unattended cemeteries
Here are other unattended cemeteries in the area:
OAK HILL: The Saints and Sinners cemeteries have been neglected for many years. The Sinners section is hidden beneath heavy growth and no longer used, while the Saints portion is still used but not regularly cared for. As for the name, some historians say the church members were buried in the Saints area and nonmembers in the Sinners. Others say it was for the affluent and the paupers.
DELTONA: Founded in the 1870s, Garfield Settlement Cemetery, which has 13 graves of former slaves who were liberated during the Civil War by Union forces, was abandoned and threatened by development in 2000, but city officials forced its protection.
DAYTONA BEACH: Mount Arrarat Cemetery at the intersection of Bellevue Avenue and Clyde Morris Boulevard is the final resting place for 168 veterans, many of them black, and has had trouble with overgrown grass and vandalism.
FLAGLERCOUNTY: In the late 1940s, a developer built houses over a black cemetery in Bunnell and gave land elsewhere to the Masonic lodge for future burials. The original cemetery had 100 graves and the newer one, Masonic Cemetery on Old Kings Road in Palm Coast, has since fallen into disrepair with some volunteers cleaning it up.
EDGEWATER: Oaklynn, a historically black cemetery on Airpark Road, wasn't cared for in decades until a high school student made its cleanup a class project in 2001. That sparked a group of descendents to form an association to take donations for regular cleanup.
SOURCE: Area historians and News-Journal archives.