On a Florida farm, signs of a forgotten black cemetery
Neighbor calling for archaeologists to survey land for graves
ODESSA — There’s no sign of a cemetery on Carolyn Wilson’s land. Just green grass, a barn and more than a dozen racehorses put out to pasture.
Wilson has heard there are headstones here, though, piled up at the bottom of a pond that college fraternity members called “Suicide Lake,” back in the days when they would sneak in for a night-time dive as a rite of initiation. And somewhere on Wilson’s 130-acre Bay Tree Farm about 25 miles north of downtown Tampa, it’s likely that 75 or more people from pioneering black families in Odessa were buried during the first half of the 20th century.
One East Tampa woman who used to live nearby remembers it. Curtiss Wilson, 91, no relation to the property owner, said her father tried in vain to save the burial ground by sprucing it up after new white landowners said it could no longer be used as a cemetery.
And a report on Tampa cemeteries issued in 1941 by the federal
Works Progress Administration describes a “Keystone Memorial Park (Colored) Cemetery,” 7.5 miles south on Gunn Highway from the Odessa post office and two-tenths of a mile to the left down Woods Road.
The post office building and Woods Road are gone. The headstones disappeared.
As for the bodies, “Nobody moved anybody,” Curtiss Wilson said. “They are still there.”
Now, nearly 70 years later, emboldened by renewed interest across Tampa Bay in forgotten African American cemeteries, Cur
tiss Wilson is calling on Carolyn Wilson to have archaeologists survey her land for graves.
Afterward, Curtiss Wilson said, she hopes some type of memorial can be erected.
The two women have never talked about the cemetery. But informed by the Tampa Bay Times of the request, Carolyn Wilson said, “I am not going to fight this. I want to know.”
A developer and the namesake of an art gallery at the University of South Florida, Carolyn Wilson purchased the Odessa property in 1981. She later heard there might have been a burial ground somewhere on the land.
She reached out to a small church that once operated the cemetery, Mount Pleasant AME Church in Odessa, but never heard back, she said.
Earlier this year, she figured someone would contact her because of the widespread attention that followed the discovery by the Times of forgotten Zion Cemetery, believed to be Tampa’s first AfricanAmerican burial place. Buildings were erected atop Zion even though as many as 800 graves are still there, and plans are underway to turn the property into a memorial.
The Odessa land’s previous owners, the Woodard family, ran a monument company, so Carolyn Wilson’s story about the headstones could describe company debris tossed into the lake.
But state records indicate the company operated out of Jacksonville.
Or the story may arise from the clearing of the Keystone cemetery. The burial ground was near the lake, but exactly where isn’t clear.
“If bodies are there,” Carolyn Wilson said, “it is sacred.”
The story of the Keystone cemetery begins in the 1860s when Tony Lewis — freed from slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation — homesteaded the property, according to a history provided by Mount Pleasant AME Church.
In the early 1900s, Lewis established the cemetery and built a church that doubled as a school for African-Americans living in the rural area during the era of segregation. Charlie Walker, Curtiss Wilson’s father, was a minister with the church.
The church building was struck by lightning, caught fire and burned around 1920. Parishioner Barbara Allen donated neighboring property at 9703 Gunn Hwy. for a new school.
Walker petitioned the Hillsborough County School Board for supplies to build what became the Citrus Park Colored
School. Curtiss Wilson and her brother Mordecai Walker attended.
The little red schoolhouse opened in 1925 and, in a reversal of roles, it was used by Mount Pleasant AME for services. In 1947, a separate church was built on the property.
The community continued burying its dead at the cemetery Lewis had established nearby.
Walker, 95, who now lives in St. Petersburg, recalled walking from the school and cutting through the cemetery to reach the lake and pick flowers for girls.
Curtiss Wilson, his sister, said no sign identified the burial ground but it was known as the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Some of the grave markers were temporary and washed away in the rain, others were granite headstones.
Many graves were covered in poured concrete right after the funeral, Wilson and Walker said. They estimate there were 50 to 75 marked graves and more that were not marked.
Carolyn Wilson wants to mark the location of the cemetery somehow, so this final resting place can remain undisturbed.
“They are welcome here,” she said. “If graves are there, they are at peace. This is a peaceful place.”