Hidden Beneath Asphalt: Unearthing a Forgotten African American Cemetery With 70 Graves in Florida
The site was previously where the St. Matthew Missionary Baptist Church established its cemetery which housed the graves of the neighborhood’s black residents. But the church could no longer afford to keep the property. After the cemetery site was sold, most of the graves were moved to another cemetery in nearby Dunedin.
However, it was long rumored that an unknown number of bodies were left behind because many graves in the St. Matthew cemetery were unmarked.
The black neighborhood of Clearwater Heights was first established in the early 1900s. The neighborhood’s former bounds stretched between Cleveland Street, Court Street, Missouri Avenue, and Ewing Avenue. The cemetery was created by the St. Matthews Baptist Church in 1909.
James Borchuck/Tampa Bay TimesFormer Clearwater Heights resident Muhammad Abdur-Rahim, like most former residents of the black neighborhood, remembered stories about the lost bodies of the cemetery.
In 1955, the church sold the land for $15,000. The cemetery was already at full-capacity, but the church managed to sell the property to a group of real estate owners who also owned Parklawn Memorial Cemetery for African Americans in Dunedin.
According to former Clearwater Heights residents, the new owners moved the bodies at the church cemetery to the one in Dunedin. But the unmarked graves were likely left behind during the transition and, by the 1980s, Clearwater Heights no longer existed.
Still, the unresolved issue of the lost graves stayed with former residents.
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