COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. — Like so many other local intersections, this one is busy — but slow down for one second and you'll notice a gravesite.
It might be hard to see but Collier County Museums tells Fox 4's Shari Armstrong that what's seen at the intersection of Goodlette-Frank Road and Pine Ridge Road aren't just wooden stakes — they're burial site markers.
"It's been hidden but not forgotten," says Vincent Keeys, the President of the Collier County NAACP. Keeys says that below each marker lies a coffin, 8 of them, and one possibly a child's.
These graves have been overlooked but how does that happen? Amanda Townsend, the Director for Collier County Museums, tells us that while you might see buildings and traffic in that intersection in 2023, it was The Rosemary Cemetery that opened back in 1930.
Townsend says that it was a segregated cemetery. It extends to what we know as Goodlette-Frank Rd and was eventually divided up into different plots. B, W, and N — the Director tells us that the county only owns some of the remaining lands in Plot B. Records from 1944 show that Plot N was clearly labeled as "Unmarked Negro Graves."
"Where our white pioneers are buried we have a fence and we have headstones and we properly recognize those peoples' lives" — Townsend says the county is now doing the same for Plot N. Unmarked, or what some call "forgotten", African American gravesites can be found across the country.
There are 18 in Florida according to the non-profit Black Cemetery Network. In fact, Governor Ron DeSantis launched a task force in 2021 to study these forgotten African American cemeteries.
Jaha Cummings, who is part of that task force called Abandoned African American Cemeteries says, "our job was to guide the Department of State." He is also a council member from Punta Gorda and says the ties to these unmarked graves are historical — a history often rooted in oral storytelling in African American culture. "There's an African proverb that says, when an elder dies, their library burns down."
Getty's Conservation Research Foundation and Museum say cemeteries help historians outline major events, settlement patterns, and demographics, but they're losing these historical indicators quickly to things like natural disasters and development.
In the final report of the Governor's task force, you'll see a quote — "the need to highlight and define 'abandoned,' 'neglected,' 'lost,' 'forgotten,' 'stolen' and 'erased' African-American cemeteries to make clear the distinction between such cemeteries." Keeys says it's why he's pushed in the last few years for a historical marker for Plot N in Collier County.
The county tells us that the hold-up includes finding the owner of the plot. Townsend adds, "because [the plots] are so small and because the property owners of records are deceased, we've had to work through a lot of ideas on how to properly convey the property and we're closer than ever."
We asked Keeys what he would say to those people who would rather leave the graves alone and move on. His response was, "There are a lot of people who want us to let it go and move on. But we cannot be erased from the history books and we have to tell our kids this story."
