Old City Cemetery in Tallahassee, Florida

Old City Cemetery is the oldest public cemetery in Tallahassee, established in 1829 and acquired by the city in 1840, and it lies between Call Street and Park Avenue just west of downtown.

The City of Tallahassee's Old City Cemetery history calls it one of the city's most distinctive historic sites and the final resting place for many of the men and women who contributed to the development of Tallahassee and the state of Florida. Its eastern half runs along what is now Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard and its western section along present-day Macomb Street. The 1963 state historical marker places it between Call Street and Park Avenue.

Because it was Tallahassee's only public burying ground for much of the 19th century, the city says, the cemetery represents a cross-section of the town's people: slaves and planters, governors and store clerks, veterans of wars and victims of yellow fever. Nearby St. John's Episcopal Cemetery was established in 1840 for its own congregation.

The Territorial Legislative Council established the cemetery in 1829, and the city laid out its system of squares and lots in 1841, when a violent yellow fever epidemic swept Tallahassee.

The Tallahassee city history says the 1841 regulations were required to assure order and sanitation to protect the public. When the cemetery was established, it lay outside the city boundaries on the far side of a 200-foot-wide clearing that surrounded the town to protect it from Indian attacks. The state marker says the present boundaries were established by the Florida Territorial Council in 1829, and adds that some early Tallahasseans were buried several hundred feet east of the site.

City pages describe the founding in two ways. The Old City Cemetery history credits the Territorial Legislative Council with establishing the ground in 1829, while the city's Greenwood Cemetery history says that in 1841 Tallahassee's City Commissioners established Old City Cemetery as a burial place for both blacks and whites, with segregated burial areas. The two city pages do not reconcile the dates, and both are given here.

The early years were rough. Newspaper accounts from the territorial and early statehood period, the city says, complained of cattle and hogs running over the graves, and in 1834 a Tallahassee resident wrote to the editor asking the City Council to provide a one-horse hearse to replace the custom of bringing the coffin in a rough cart.

Old City Cemetery was segregated from the start, with white burials in the eastern half and enslaved people and free people of color in the western section, according to the City of Tallahassee.

The segregation was administrative as well as physical. The city quotes the ordinance establishing the cemetery, published August 21, 1841, in the Florida Sentinel, which told the superintendent to keep two separate books, one for white persons and one for negroes and persons of color, the second distinguishing free persons of color from slaves and listing, for a slave, the owner's name. Today a pathway about six feet wide marks the old dividing line, and a former caretaker recalled that in the 1950s a hogwire fence ran north to south down the center of the Tallahassee burying ground.

Religious denominations also had designated plots in Old City Cemetery, though the city says few signs of the Presbyterian and Catholic areas remain. A Jewish section was first established in 1890 in the first two lots north of the main eastern entrance, then relocated to the western edge of the northeast quadrant near the crest of the hill, where a large obelisk bears the Star of David. The city believes most of the burials there at the turn of the century were later moved to Jacksonville.

In 1936 and 1937 the City of Tallahassee created a separate Black cemetery and closed public burial grounds to Black burials, which led Black residents to found Greenwood Cemetery in 1937.

The city's Greenwood history says a second public cemetery, Oakland, was established in 1902, again with separate burial areas. In September 1936, City Ordinance 272 created Evergreen Cemetery near Abraham and Alabama Streets as a public burying ground for Black residents; on October 13, 1936, a delegation of Black citizens told the City Commission that the land was too low for cemetery purposes. On January 12, 1937, the city sexton recommended closing the Black section of the old cemetery, and an ordinance passed unanimously; the city notes that this old cemetery was Oakland, not Old City Cemetery.

In response, the Greenwood Cemetery Company was founded on March 19, 1937, to acquire land for a burial place near Tallahassee in Leon County. Greenwood, like Old City Cemetery, is now one of the five cemeteries owned and operated by the City government, according to the city's cemeteries page.

Official records name Civil War dead from the Battle of Natural Bridge and the minister and county commissioner James Page among those buried in Old City Cemetery.

The city history says that after the Battle of Natural Bridge, Union casualties were buried in the colored section and Confederates in the white section. The 1963 state marker describes graves of Confederate and Federal troops, white and Black, some of them fatalities from the 1865 battle, which it calls the end of the Northern attempt to seize the capital.

The 2023 Father James Page marker on North Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard says Page was born enslaved in Richmond, Virginia, in 1808, came to Middle Florida with the Parkhill family in 1827, began preaching around Tallahassee in 1828 and was formally ordained in the Baptist church in 1851. He founded dozens of congregations, among them St. Peter Primitive Baptist, Concord Baptist, Bethlehem Baptist and Bethel Baptist, served as one of three Leon County voter registrars in 1867 and was the first African American on the Leon County commission, from 1868 to 1870. The marker says he died March 14, 1883, and was buried in the segregated section of Tallahassee's Old City Cemetery.

Old City Cemetery's recorded history runs from its territorial founding in 1829 through the 1963 state marker and a 2023 marker for James Page, one of its best-known burials.

The City of Tallahassee owns and operates Old City Cemetery through its Cemeteries office at 300 South Adams Street, and it does not permit stone rubbings because the historic markers are hard and expensive to maintain.

Most of the city's overview comes from publications of the former Historic Tallahassee Preservation Board, which in the early 1990s undertook an evaluation and restoration of many of the cemetery's monuments with help from Sass Conservation of New York City and the Center for Historic Cemeteries Preservation. The city says many early graves were marked with wooden head and footboards that have since deteriorated; the surviving early markers are marble with simple designs expressing grief and mourning, and later markers reflect the Victorian interest in classical art and architecture.

Questions go to City Cemeteries at 850-891-8711. The city's cemeteries page offers a searchable index of burials in the five city-owned cemeteries, but notes that the main listing includes only burials recorded in its master database since the mid-1980s, so most 19th century Old City Cemetery burials will not appear there. New grave spaces are sold at Roselawn, Southside and Oakland, not at Old City Cemetery.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by rereading the City of Tallahassee's Old City Cemetery, Greenwood Cemetery and city-owned cemeteries pages and the Florida Department of State's Old City Cemetery and Father James Page markers.