Hoping to recover buried history
Grad student seeks lost Black cemeteries in Fla.
As an archaeologist, Juliana Waters spends much of her time poring through archives and historical records, sitting in libraries or government offices and scrutinizing everything from land deeds to aerial photos.
What Waters enjoys most, though, is putting on her hiking books and venturing into the field, scanning for any indications that a piece of land might once have held graves.
Waters, a graduate student in anthropology and archaeology at the University of South Florida, is completing a master’s thesis on her search for forgotten and abandoned cemeteries for Black residents in Polk County.
Waters, 27, undertook her project at a time when researchers and journalists were finding evidence of abandoned or eradicated graveyards for Blacks throughout Florida. The discovery of lost graves at the notorious (and defunct) Dozier School for Boys in the Panhandle spurred interest in other forgotten or abandoned repositories for human remains.
In the past few years, four such forgotten cemeteries have been identified in the Tampa area. Earlier this year, the Florida Legislature passed a bill creating the Task Force on Abandoned African American Cemeteries.
Rep. Fentrice Driskell, D-tampa, sponsored the House version of the bill, which Gov. Ron Desantis signed into law in June. Driskell, a Polk County native and a graduate of Lake Gibson High School, is one of 10 members of the state task force.
Waters said her project emerged from discussions with her academic advisor, Diane Wallman, and members of the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN). Seeking to determine what part of the Tampa Bay region she might concentrate on, Waters consulted a database of cemeteries compiled by former USF anthropology professor Rebecca O’sullivan, in addition to records compiled by Works Progress Administration workers in 1941.
“And we turned over to Polk County on the map, and I was like – ‘Whoa, that is a lot of cemeteries,’ ” Waters said. “And when you look at the site file, I think there was only – I don’t remember if this is the exact number, but about 13 or so in the site file, and there are far more in the county.”
Waters referred to the Florida master site file of cemeteries (and other sites), administered by the Department of State through the Bureau of Historic Preservation.
“Juliana’s work is important because it’s intentional community building through a process that is important to all communities – our places of burial,” Jeffrey T. Moates, Regional Director of the Florida Public Archaeology Network said by email.
Waters is also coordinating with the Luster African American Heritage Museum in Bartow. Adrienne Kerst, the museum’s operations and program manager and a graduate of USF’S Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, noticed a social media post from the school about Waters’ plans to research graves in Polk County.
“So I just contacted her and suggested that we might be able to help her with public outreach, putting her in contact with the people in the community who might have more information on specific cemeteries, or maybe there was a cemetery somewhere that they know of that’s now erased,” Kerst said. “She and I just started getting together.”
Kerst, describing herself as semi-retired, said she has largely worked on architectural history during her career, which included a period in South Dakota. She said she has developed a “mother-daughter” relationship with Waters.
Kerst said the collaboration makes a statement that the museum is involved with live research and not merely a site for static exhibitions.
Waters, who is not a Polk County resident, drew upon a range of sources in trying to find lost or erased cemeteries. O’sullivan herself had consulted the 1941 registry of veterans’ graves compiled by the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal agency that deployed teams of jobless Americans throughout the country.
That archive included burial sites for Black veterans, Waters said. During the first year of her master’s program, she was assigned to research potential cemeteries that couldn’t be confirmed through satellite imagery or other methods.
Waters said she consulted Polk County Property Appraiser records to determine ownership of lands that might have held graves of Black residents.
“So for example, some of the Black cemeteries that we found, they either belonged to lumber camps or turpentine camps, and when those landowners sold, either to the phosphate companies or to developers or some kind of investment company, those people had to pick up and move and their cemeteries got left behind,” Waters said.
Waters said she has examined all available archives, including old aerial photographs. She and Kerst decided to issue a news release in early October in hopes that local residents might share their historical knowledge of any cemeteries Waters’ research has missed.
Kerst said she didn’t have any particular details about lost cemeteries in Polk County to share with Waters.
“Just, when I spoke with Mr. Luster, he said he would talk about some of the cemeteries that were in the older communities, the older Black communities, that are no longer and that some of them — there’s hard access to get to them, and some are not in very good condition,” Kerst said. “So I did have a little bit of background knowledge, just from what he told me.”
Waters also works for Cardno, an infrastructure development company that has helped with the excavation of abandoned graves in Tampa.
Waters doesn’t plan to release details about her research until she completes her thesis by next May.
Waters hinted at some discoveries. “Yes, we did find some that were not known of,” she said. “We haven’t done any GPR (ground-penetrating radar) scanning or anything like that, but we did find a couple which are not known of – which is exciting.”
She added: “There is one that we found, it’s in an orange grove and it had one headstone sticking out. And apparently there’s like 80 to 100 people buried there, but you can’t see the rest of the headstones, if they are there at all. That was a lumber camp cemetery.”