Melbourne's Historic Cemeteries — Melbourne, Florida

The City of Melbourne's Cemeteries page lists two municipal burial grounds: Melbourne Cemetery at 710 E. Hibiscus Blvd. and Eau Gallie Cemetery at 992 Masterson St., in the northern part of the city that was the separate town of Eau Gallie until 1969. The city also lists a cemetery office at 2895 Harper Rd., open by appointment from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays.

Two smaller grounds hold the best documented early burials. Line Street Cemetery, on WH Jackson Street in the Crane Creek neighborhood, is a historically Black cemetery opened in 1901 that the city has maintained since 1985. The Houston Cemetery, half a block south of the Rossetter House in Eau Gallie, dates to 1865 and belongs to the Historic Rossetter House Museum. Both have been examined with ground penetrating radar, and both turned out to hold more graves than their stones show.

Line Street is the resting place of Melbourne's Black founders. A City of Melbourne release dated Nov. 7, 2025 explains that William Wright Brothers, Peter Wright and Balaam Allen were formerly enslaved people who settled at Crane Creek, the community that became Melbourne, and that Brothers and his wife, Mary Silas, are buried at Line Street. Spectrum News reported in November 2024 that the cemetery is also the final resting place of fellow founder Balaam Allen.

Allen's grave went unmarked for generations. On June 19, 2025, a Juneteenth celebration in Melbourne placed a grave marker on his resting place in Line Street Cemetery, Spectrum News 13 reported, honoring him as one of three men credited with founding the city. The station reported that most of the dozen or so graves found during the 1980 cleanup were unmarked.

The ground itself nearly disappeared. The city's account says Line Street fell into disrepair and was hidden under overgrown Brazilian pepper trees, weeds and trash until 1980, when a Boy Scout troop spent three weekends clearing it. In 1985 the land was formally deeded to the City of Melbourne for maintenance, and in 2011 the cemetery was recorded as a historic resource.

Far more than the fence enclosed. In 2021 a group of citizens asked the City of Melbourne to survey the cemetery and several Crane Creek structures, and a 2022 survey by the city's historic preservation consultant suggested graves beyond those visible. Using an Abandoned African-American Cemeteries grant, the city brought in ground penetrating radar in October 2024. The scan found 13 burials inside the fenced boundary and 31 more outside it, mostly to the north.

WKMG News 6 reported on Oct. 31, 2024 that the finding brought the Melbourne cemetery to a total of 44 graves, and that the newly located burials were temporarily marked with flags. According to Spectrum News, Line Street was one of 25 historic properties requested for survey as part of a city project researching Melbourne's origins, and a Melbourne founders historian said the unidentified plots could include other early settlers who came after the founders.

The discovery changed the cemetery's footprint. FOX 35 Orlando reported in November 2024 that Melbourne planned a permanent fence and an expansion of the roughly 50-by-50-foot cemetery on W.H. Jackson Street to just under an acre. In November 2025 the city announced a $50,000 award from the Florida Division of Historical Resources Abandoned African-American Cemeteries Grant Program for a fence around the new graves, an interpretive sign and a concrete viewing area, with the Historic and Architectural Review Board holding a public workshop on the sign at City Hall on Nov. 19, 2025.

The Houston Cemetery is the oldest burial ground in this list. The Historic Rossetter House Museum dates it to 1865, a few years after John Carroll Houston IV, whom the Eau Gallie Arts District identifies as the area's first permanent settler in 1859, built a homestead he called Arlington. Houston himself, born July 8, 1816 and died Feb. 17, 1885, is buried here, listed by the museum as the first settler of Arlington/Eau Gallie, beside his wife, Mary Virginia Houston, who died in 1894.

The museum singles out one detail of the Eau Gallie plot: initialed footstones set at the foot of graves in addition to headstones, including one cut with the letters J.C.H. The museum's burial list also records four children of William and Ada Roesch gathered around a single headstone, all of whom died between 1887 and 1895. William R. Roesch, the museum notes, served Eau Gallie as postmaster, newspaper publisher and mayor, and lived across the street from what became the Rossetter House.

As at Line Street, the visible stones understate the count. In April 2010 John J. Schultz and Joanna Fletcher of the University of Central Florida Department of Anthropology ran a ground penetrating radar survey of the Houston Cemetery. They marked eighteen anomalies in the field and detected sixteen more in processing, most in line with existing rows of Eau Gallie graves, and wrote that they would not be surprised if the anomalies represented at least 20 unmarked graves. Because only invasive testing could confirm them, the report recommended against probing.

Much less is published online about the two city-run grounds than about Line Street or the Houston plot. The city's Cemeteries page gives locations and the Harper Road office but no burial history, and a full roster of notable burials at Melbourne Cemetery on Hibiscus Boulevard is not available in public city sources. Limited public data available; further research needed.

Eau Gallie Cemetery appears in one telling line of local history. A timeline compiled by the Florida Tech School of Arts and Communication records that in the 1920s, African American students in Eau Gallie attended West Eau Gallie School, located on the west side of the Eau Gallie Cemetery. The burial ground on Masterson Street thus also marks the location of an early school for Black children in Eau Gallie.

Taken together, Melbourne's cemeteries map the two towns that merged in 1969 and the communities within them: the municipal grounds of old Melbourne and old Eau Gallie, the Houston family plot that predates both towns, and the Line Street ground where the founders of Crane Creek were buried and then nearly forgotten.