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Palm View Cemetery has a blurry history |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Monday, 03 April 2006 |
Manatee – First grader Joshua Wonderly stood in his school's parking lot Wednesday afternoon and stared down at a rectangular, blue-chalk outline of an unmarked human grave.
"It just makes me feel weird," Joshua said, wrinkling his nose in confusion.
The grave is one of 30 unmarked human grave sites underneath Palm View Elementary School's campus. School officials discovered the graves a few months ago but have continued classes as usual, without notifying parents.
"The whole thing is kind of gross, but I mean they've been there forever," Wonderly said of the grave sites. "So, I don't know. I don't think it's that big of a deal - unless someone's ancestors are buried back there. Even then, how would you know?" Located just east of Terra Ceia Bay, the Palm View area was a fishing and farming community in the late 1800s when Michael and Sarah Fielder donated a couple of acres of land to the local Board of Public Instruction and to a nearby church. Pastor Larry A. Smith, of Palm View Bible Church, told The Herald Wednesday that the history of that church and its cemetery is blurred and confusing. Smith said the church originated about 1885 as a Seventh-day Adventist church, whose members buried their relatives on nearby property. "They were here for about 35 years, and they abandoned it," Smith said, adding that sometime later a neighboring house caught fire and sparked a blaze that also burned down the church. In the 1920s, Smith said, Church of the Nazarene members re-built the building and congregated there for about 20 years. They too abandoned it, he said. That's when a pastor from First Baptist Church took over in the 1940s, according to Smith. And the church was eventually named Palm View Bible Church. Meanwhile, longtime local families like the Smiths, Gulletts and Bishops bought small plots of land and buried their loved ones in what was later dubbed Palm View Cemetery. "Those are all my ancestors, and that was their family graveyard," said Evelyn Gullett Graves, whose lineage includes that of the Andress, Gullett and Bishop families. But - after decades of random and sometimes undo*****ented burials - the cemetery's boundaries were unclear. "It's been confusing," Smith said, adding that he started serving as pastor at Palm View Bible Church in 1995. Smith said he didn't initially know that the cemetery was to be under his care. He said there was also confusion about who could be buried there. "No one's keeping up with who owns what," said Fred Reeder, whose family owns plots in the cemetery. Some local funeral homes have inadvertently buried people on those already claimed plots, Smith said. The funeral home directors, he said, thought the cemetery was county property. Reeder also said school officials recently claimed part of the land inside the cemetery's fence is the district's property. "The school board says they own the property up to here," Reeder said as he stood beside two graves about 6 feet from the fence. "Well, that puts my father-in-law in a playground." The overlap
By 1885, a log cabin schoolhouse served 10 children in eight grade levels. A white-painted, wooden school later replaced the log cabin in 1918, and a multipurpose school building was built in 1926. Manatee County school officials started adding to the school, which is adjacent to the cemetery, and expanded it over the years. The 1926 Mediterranean-style building now serves as the school's media center. Today, a chain-link fence separates the school from its longtime neighbor Palm View Cemetery. But school officials discovered a few months ago that Palm View Elementary sits atop more than 30 graves. For at least 75 years, or since the school board has owned the property, students and teachers have unknowingly walked and driven over dozens of grave sites. The discovery of the grave sites could result in the demolition of part of the school. School board attorney John Bowen told The Herald it was an overlap in the property boundaries that prompted school officials - who were preparing for the construction of a new classroom building on the campus - to hire experts to scan the area with a ground-penetrating sonar device that shows variations in soil density. The sonar readings revealed three grave sites and one double-grave site on school property just east of a fence. And subsequent readings revealed 12 more unmarked grave sites underneath a parking lot of the school and about 16 others in various locations, including a few partially underneath the northwest steps of the school's media center. "That has to go way back," said Karla Brogdon, a descendent of the Mead family, which has inhabited the area for about 100 years. "That has to be cowboy and Indian days." Brogdon lives down the street from the school, church and cemetery and said she went to school at Palm View Elementary from kindergarten until sixth grade. "It's not the ideal situation, I'm sure," Brogdon said, adding that none of her family members were buried in that cemetery. "It's very surprising." But Graves said it's no surprise to her. Graves said she knows of at least five people in her family who were buried in the area without headstones, including a Civil War veteran. She also said some markers in the current Palm View Cemetery aren't above actual graves and that they were placed there at random to memorialize relatives whose graves were not marked. But, she said, she doesn't think anything should be changed. "I'd just say leave them like they are," Graves said. "They're not hurting anything." Reeder shared a similar thought. "What's done is done. You can't go back and fix a broke egg," he said. What next?
School officials referred the find to District Medical Examiner Russell Vega in early March. "I have notified the state archaeologist and the Division of Historical Resources," Vega wrote in a March 14 letter to the school district. Ryan Wheeler, state archaeologist, said it's too soon to tell what will happen. "We really haven't seen any of the studies they have done," Wheeler said. Wheeler said findings of unmarked graves are reported to his office at least once a week. "Discovery of unmarked human burials are quite common," he said. "We deal with it all the time." School officials announced Wednesday that classes at Palm View Elementary will resume as scheduled Monday when the spring break is over. Pat Ranta, Joshua's grandmother, walked through campus that afternoon and said she was fascinated by the situation and that she doesn't mind business going on at school as usual. "This is a nice school, a very nice school," she said looking around. "It didn't surprise me. You know that graveyard has to come past the fence." Joshua, 6, said he would be "mad" if part of his school was torn down because of the unmarked graves - even if their "creepy" presence makes him feel weird. Grave sites
A BLURRY HISTORY
• Chronicle of Palm View Cemetery goes back to the 1800s, but is cloudy • Some relatives of those buried prefer to leave school sites alone Source: http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/14164183.htm
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