For more than 100 years, three cemeteries in West Coconut Grove have been the final resting place for the men and women prominent in building and leading what had long been one of South Florida’s most vibrant Black communities.
Among those buried in above-ground crypts are many of the city’s original Bahamian settlers, including Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup, a real estate developer, and his wife Charlotte Jane Stirrup, for whom one of the burial grounds is named.
But also interred beneath the live oaks and gumbo limbo trees are hundreds of West Grove residents whose names and legacies lie buried in unrecorded graves that are unmarked, painted over or so weathered by time that inscriptions have been worn away.
“We were surprised to learn that so many graves are unknown,” said Paulette Culmer, speaking for herself and her twin sister Paula, both retired federal employees, and lifelong Grove residents.
The Culmers have several relatives buried in the cemeteries that share the Charles Avenue block in which they live. “We assumed that all would be documented by now.”
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Enter Grove resident Lea Nickless, an artist and researcher who has been distributing a “call for participation,” inviting the community to join her project centered on the West Grove’s three historic cemeteries, on three adjoining parcels between Charles and Franklin avenues at Douglas Road
“My goal,” writes Nickless, “is to create a sustainable database that will preserve and honor the memory of these individuals. If you have family members buried in this cemetery, I would love to hear from you and to gather any stories or images you might be willing to share.”
The database Nickless aims to build would include “names, birth and death dates, places of birth, occupations and other details that tell the stories of their lives.”
So far, she has documented 800 of somewhere over 1,000 buried in the Grove.
The Historic Coconut Grove Cemetery was first used as a graveyard for the Grove’s Bahamian settlers in 1906, according to a historical marker erected by the Coconut Grove Cemetery Association.
“The community’s original cemetery was a small lot opened by the city in 1904 on what is now the 3500 block of Charles Avenue,” reads the marker’s citation. “That site was judged by the town leaders to be too small to accommodate the needs of the growing population and the cemetery was moved to its present location.”
In 1913, the Stirrup family and four others purchased an adjacent property abutting Douglas Road. The price: $140.
Over the years there have been attempts to compile a record of those buried in the Grove. In 1992, with a commission from the Coconut Grove Cemetery Association, Research Atlantica, Inc., conducted a field survey of the association-run cemetery and came up with a phone book-sized document that describes the location of every gravesite, with the names, dates and epitaphs of many.
There are no family histories in the surveys, but some poignant stories can be gleaned nonetheless. Gracy G. Sampson, “Our darling,” lived for just five months before dying in July 1914. Sherman Harrison lived to be 80 before his burial in 1934 in a grave marked by an anthropomorphic headstone, shaped to resemble his head and shoulders — one of 12 such stones found only in Miami-Dade County.
Yet the identities of many buried in the Grove remain a mystery.
For the rapidly gentrifying West Grove, whose Black population is shrinking by the year, the cemeteries would seem to be a touchstone to the past, an inviolable anchor that could serve to bring former residents back to their hometown.
Marvin Dunn, an emeritus professor at Florida International University and author of many books and studies of Florida’s Black communities, cautions that the power of historic ties is not absolute.
“When generations move away from where their ancestors are, they tend not to come back because of loss of the neighborhood itself,” said Dunn. “It is not home to most; it’s too strange, too new, has a different vibe.
However, adds Dunn, that does not mean that the cemeteries are any less valuable.
“We need to know who’s there,” he said. “The dead deserve it, whether they know it or not, they have rights. This is sacred ground, hallowed ground.”
Nickless said she approaches her project as both an artist and a historian.
She spent years of her childhood in England, where her family lived near the cemetery at Stoke Poges — the burial ground that inspired Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” published in 1751. “I loved wandering in the graveyard,” she said. “From an early age I developed a fascination,”
After a peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a NBC News cameraman, Nickless settled in Miami in 1983 and began working as collections manager for Mitchell “Micky” Wolfson Jr. a businessman and founder of The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, a research center and museum in Miami Beach.
Charles Smith, who goes by “Charlie Bahama,” hosts a Nassau-based YouTube talk show featuring celebrities, travel tips and contests.
His family owned the Royal Poinciana Luncheonette and Beer Garden at 215 Grand Ave., and he is working on a documentary film focused on the contributions Bahamians made in South Florida. He applauds Nickless’s work.
“I think this is going to be a wonderful project,” says Smith, 60. “Bahamians were so tight back then. Everyone knew the stories. Just to document it all, so years from now, those of Bahamian heritage and others will know a little bit of the story. That’s important information.”
This story was originally published in the Coconut Grove Spotlight, a WLRN News partner.
