It’s not something you see every day.
A gravesite in the middle of a sidewalk in a Jacksonville neighborhood just feet away from a park where children play.
News4JAX went to get answers about the Durkeeville burial site that has been there for decades. It’s right next to the Emmett Reed Community Center and tennis courts.
The grave of Thompson Williams is just one of the many gravesites in the area that was once a cemetery.
Ennis Davis, a historian, urban planner and co-founder of Community Planning Cooperative and Urban Planning, has been researching and working on a revitalization project for Durkeeville.
“This park is unique because it is Jacksonville’s largest 19th-century African American cemetery,” Davis said.
He explained how the unusual gravesite ended up where it is.
“This alone should let you know that the development of this street and its infrastructure was built over a cemetery, and they moved the grave in the middle of the sidewalk just to do it,” Davis said.
Davis told News4JAX he studied the history of the area and found the land was a large-scale cemetery for the then-growing LaVilla community of the 1800s.
“You dig up older maps and I came across an 1800s map of Jacksonville that had a zoomed-in map of ownership in the LaVilla area, and this was identified as the Mount Herman Cemetery,” Davis said.
Below is a map of Jacksonville from 1887 from the State Library and Archives of Florida.
Durkeeville is listed and alongside the railroad tracks is the Mount Herman Cemetery just feet from Thompson Williams’ gravesite, most likely a part of the same cemetery.
But according to Davis, in the 1940s Mount Herman cemetery was donated to the city by its private owner, someone from the Francis L’Engle family, the first mayor of LaVilla. The bodies were removed, and Emmett Reed Center was built on top of the cemetery.
But 20 steps away, the rest of the cemetery is still there with children playing just feet away in a park.
Davis said what’s there was a plot for one particular family I the 1800s with the last name Fagin. Among the family members is a United States military veteran.
Freddie Paney, a Jacksonville native, told News4JAX the cemetery has existed since he was a child.
Paney believes there isn’t much that can be done to fix the situation, and he thinks he might never find his family that’s buried on the land.
“What they should do is put a big sign up and let people know that it was a cemetery,” Paney told News4JAX.
For now, the Thompson Williams gravesite remains a part of the sidewalk and generations of the dead lie overlooked.
Also in Durkeeville is the historic Black Wilder Park, which was demolished when Interstate 95 was built.
News4JAX reached out to the city of Jacksonville for comment on what could possibly be done for the forgotten gravesites. We are waiting to hear back.