A Park for Mount Dora’s Lost History

Wedged between golf fairways and expensive houses, a small, abandoned cemetery raises fresh questions about Mount Dora’s history — and what, if anything, we intend to do with it.

In writing my story about the Country Club of Mount Dora, I heard about a small abandoned cemetery at an eastern corner of the property. As part of the planned unit development (PUD) agreement with the city, the narrow, half-acre lot is protected against development. Houses abut it from either side and there are golf fairways just beyond either end.

Taking pictures of the Country Club for this story, I found the cemetery just off a cul-de-sac at one end of the Stone Bridge community. Historic markers standing on poles at every entrance identify the area as a private cemetery.

Inside, it is typical Florida forest, dense, overgrown, with big saw palmettos wedged among a number of small trees. The underbrush of fallen leaves and trees is dense. There are a few leaf-littered trails where you can walk, but off of them walking is dicey among so much overgrowth. Batting major cobwebs is not my usual Saturday morning fare.

One cement headstone, mossy and littered with leaves, is prominent. It reads:

Anna Chatman
wife of
Will Chatman
Died June 4, 1941
Kussellville SC

Walking around I found three more markers, all very small and made of tin, green with mold, just large enough for a card giving death details. One was for a John Scoggins, died May 1, 1941, aged 53. Another for a Johnnie Haynes, died 1947. The third tin marker had lost its card — it may have never had one. Its tin frame looked much more aged, but it looks like someone had scratched the name “Mary” something on it.

The cement marker and the three tin ones are all within 30 feet of each other, along the lot’s northern edge. Searching everywhere else, I could find no more markers. A file on the cemetery in office of the Country Club’s homeowners association has some background, though not much. An email printout stated there were a couple more cement markers. One was for a military man named Elmo Mills, killed in France in 1943, another flat slab with a name etched in it. The email date was 1998, so it’s very likely that those markers had subsumed beneath the slow carpet of falling forest litter.

That was about all. Someone laid in a much later addition — some colored plastic flowers with a piece of stone that had been painted a date — 5–11–12 — and the name “Claire,” followed by a heart with an arrow through it. What are graveyards for, if not memorials? I wondered if any pets from the area’s more recent residents might be interred here.

But there wasn’t much more visible evidence. A few beer cans here and there, a backpack half-buried in leaves, and some very old-looking hootch bottles near one of the markers, How many bodies in their deepest, ageless slumber I stepped over, lost now to time and memory and the earth’s steady accumulation of more falling things, I could not tell.

Homeowners there know about the cemetery, and why it is protected. Though small, it stands out, like a very old comma in a much-updated text. Golfers used to traipse through the area getting from one fairway to another until the markers were put up (the city approved the HOA’s application for historic markers for the cemetery in 2015).

The HOA file offered little more. There is no historical background about the cemetery. A 1999 letter from a Winter Park attorney to Morrison Homes stated that no visitors had been to the cemetery for at least ten years if not more, and it was not known if there were any permanent remains in the cemetery.

There were suggestions as to who to ask to find out more, but follow-up, if any, was not documented. it’s likely that it’s one of several black cemeteries in the area. Mount Carmel-Simpson cemetery, located behind St. Patrick Catholic Church, has about four dozen graves and was considerably cleaned up by volunteers several years ago. There’s another black cemetery in Sorrento, one just outside of Eustis, and a third, now lost on what used to be an orange plantation reportedly close to where the Wekiva Parkway is now under construction.

In Florida, there are an estimated 3,850 cemeteries, about half of which are neglected or abandoned. There may be as many as 20 abandoned cemeteries in Lake County alone.

Black cemeteries are the most neglected, as in earlier days blacks had to be buried apart from whites. In Mount Dora’s Pine Forest Cemetery, blacks are interred on the north side of the graveyard. This reflects a time before the 1920s when blacks and whites lived more amicably in Mount Dora. From the 1920s until as late as the 1980s, no blacks were allowed internment.

There are also countless burials around the state of native Americans who formerly resided in the area. A stretch running from Lake Apopka into Lake County was a thriving Native American habitat going back 10,000 years, so who know how many generations of very old Mount Dora citizens we walk over.

Looking for any intel I could online (always risky), I came across a Haunted Places website that lists the Country Club cemetery. It says a local legend has it that late at night you can often hear the crying of a woman wandering around the overgrown graveyard, or see a greenish light floating around near a huge tree with long thick horizontal limbs that sits close to the green. “The place is unnaturally quiet if you pay close attention.” If anyone has ever had these experiences in the graveyard, please let me know … and what graveyard isn’t unusually quiet, as if hushed by the deep sleep of the lost?

But that’s all. True to the nature of abandoned cemeteries, so much is lost and perhaps unrecoverable. And yet .. something in our human nature has us deeply tied to our lost ancestors. Is it that their memory must be respected, or do we fear losing memory itself? (That is a real threat in the digital age.)

Whatever the case, proper respect for the dead is well past due for this little, lonely cemetery. Cal Rolfson, the Second District councilman I interviewed for the Country Club of Mount Dora story, said he thought it would be a great Eagle Scout project to attempt some sort of cleanup of the cemetery.

But it’s not a little project. The 2010 effort to clean up and identify the buried in the Mount Carmel-Simpson graveyard was financed by $20,000 in local donations and led by the Mount Dora Historical Society, with volunteer efforts by the Boy Scouts and members of the community. Southwestern Surveying was hired to use ground-penetrating radar to locate remains (19 new graves were found.) Mount Dora High students then tried to track down descendants of those buried by interviewing longtime residents of Mount Dora and west Orange County.

Proper respect for the dead — all our lost ones — is no small order. It would take a significant up-front effort by someone just to determine what is known and already done from sources that are old now, not apparently online or distantly linked or archived. And as time moves forward, old sources become even more obscure. People’s memories fade, or they die with them.

Do you know anything about this cemetery, about its residents, their fates? Can our digital networking actually serve memory in this case? Please let us know, and we’ll provide an update.

In Florida where development moves so fast, with so little of the past preserved in the race to get the next best thing built over it, spaces like cemeteries offer something so hard to find these day: stillness. The grace of deep time. Maybe even something sacred.

In the tiny cemetery wedged between the best evidence of 21stcentury suburban life, this unnamed, overgrown, covered-over and almost completely forgotten end for some of Mount Dora’s lost citizens may just continue turning back into a half-acre of primeval Florida forest — or it may become an important marker in the city’s history.

Someone — perhaps all of us — has to decide.

David Cohea ([email protected])

Originally published at www.mountdoracitizen.com on January 17, 2016.