JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The remains of “multiple people” that police said were uncovered this week at two sites on the city’s Northside could be from a gravesite that’s more than a century old, according to the Duval County property appraiser.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said Thursday morning that it had found at least two sets of human remains between the two Northside sites that were searched over the last several days. One site is at Interstate 295 and North Main Street. That’s where construction crews initially unearthed bones, including a skull, on Tuesday when a bulldozer pushed through a pile of dirt being used to build a new overpass ramp. The other is a Florida Department of Transportation site is about 3 miles away off Eastport Road, north of Heckscher Drive, where bones were dug up with dirt that was delivered to the construction site.
According to JSO, it’s possible there was an old cemetery.
On Thursday afternoon, when News4Jax met with Duval County Property Appraiser Jerry Holland to learn more about the land off Eastport Road, he and his staff pulled up plot maps of the land that date back to the 1850s. The maps identify who owned the land and what was on it at the time.
The property is zoned timberland. It used to be owned by the St. Regis Paper Company, which bought it from the Broward family. The Browards made their fortune on timber and owned the land for more than 100 years.
“It was owned by two people in the tree industry since the ’50s, and prior to that, one family owned it. The Broward family owned it for the 100 years prior to that," Holland said. "So, it didn’t have a lot of owners subdividing it or doing anything to it other than planting trees and cultivating that.”
Holland said the maps did not indicate any cemetery or family burial grounds. But he said the bones could possibly belong to people who worked on the land for the owner, or there is a possibility the bones predate the Broward ownership.
“It could go back even further. A lot of people in this area used prison labor, and sometimes when prisoners died, they buried them on the site. It could even go back to slave labor, but it will really matter when they find additional information, some remains that may identify gravesite or identify grave markings. That will help date it and it will help us determine if it should have been marked as a family plot," Holland said.
Holland said he came to that conclusion because police did not announce that searchers located grave markers, which would indicate a proper burial. Holland said slaves often didn’t have proper burials.
“Very possible, especially when they were doing work and had a lot of slaves, and lost those slaves, they would bury them in a site. A lot of times those were mass sites. They weren’t individual graves," Holland said.
Holland said the land where the bones were unearthed had been left in its natural state for countless decades, which is another reason why he speculates the remains might predate the Broward family ownership of the land.
There is no estimate of how old the remains are. Photos of the remains, including the skull, were sent to News4Jax.
“From looking at the remains you just showed me, obviously going back more than 50 years. Maybe going back to the ’30s, ’20s or before the 1900s," Holland said.
Due to their graphic nature, News4Jax is not showing the photos.
The Sheriff’s Office said it is working with the medical examiner and a forensic anthropologist to identify the remains, which could take months.