Oaklawn Cemetery — Tampa, Florida

Oaklawn Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Tampa and the city's first public burial ground. The City of Tampa Parks and Recreation Department dates it to 1850 and lists it at 606 E Harrison St., on the northern edge of downtown, open from 8 am to 6 pm every day. The grounds hold two adjoining cemeteries: the city-owned Oaklawn and the Catholic-owned St. Louis Cemetery. Together they cover approximately three acres.

Oaklawn is one of eight cemeteries the City of Tampa maintains, a group that also includes Woodlawn, Marti-Colon, Centro Asturiano, Jackson Heights, Memorial Park and Pyramid Crypts and that together holds over 40,000 burials, according to the city cemeteries page. The city states that no spaces remain for sale; plots were long ago sold and deeded. In 2017 Oaklawn received a designation on the National Register of Historic Places, and in the same year the city worked with the USF Department of Anthropology to build an interactive map of the Harrison Street grounds.

When Oaklawn was laid out in 1850, Tampa was a struggling town of around 500 people. The city's walking tour records that minutes of the Alachua County Commissioners designated the site a public burying ground for white and slave, rich and poor. A portion was set aside for enslaved people and for those the record calls marginal persons, including pirates, and public money paid for the burial of the indigent.

Most of the first Oaklawn markers were carved cypress. Stone had to reach Tampa by an expensive combination of sail, steamship and wagon, because the town had no rail service until 1884. Fire, rot and storms destroyed many of the wooden markers, leaving graves without durable identification. The original plat of the cemetery was also misplaced after the Civil War, so the locations and names of many early interments were lost. The gaps in the Oaklawn record date from that period.

The city also places Oaklawn within a national change in burial custom. The rural cemetery stop of the tour describes how severe colonial attitudes toward death softened by the early nineteenth century, and how family plots and crowded church graveyards gave way to designed public grounds with landscaping, paved paths, statuary and markers. The city calls Oaklawn an early Tampa example of that rural cemetery trend.

The walking tour counts many of Tampa's pioneer families, thirteen mayors of the city, one Florida governor, two Florida Supreme Court justices and the framers of five state constitutions among those buried at Oaklawn. The first of the mayors is Joseph B. Lancaster, Tampa's first mayor, who also sat on the Florida Supreme Court in 1851 and was Speaker of the Florida House from 1843 to 1847. The Lancaster stop notes a lasting puzzle: local records, Masonic accounts and a headstone place his 1856 burial at Oaklawn, yet a memorial stone for him also stands in the old city cemetery in Jacksonville.

Henry Laurens Mitchell, an attorney who served as the 15th Governor of Florida from 1892 to 1896, is the only state governor buried at Oaklawn, according to the city. James McKay Sr. arrived in the Tampa area from Scotland with his wife Matilda in 1848, operated commercial sailing and steam vessels, ran the Union blockade during the Civil War and served as mayor of Tampa from February 1859 to February 1860, the tour states.

John P. Wall, a Confederate Army surgeon born near Jasper, Florida, moved to Tampa in 1869. The Wall stop lists his later roles as Tampa mayor, editor of The Sunland Tribune, a state representative and founder of the Tampa Board of Trade. Cattle families are here too: William B. Hooker gained his land through the 1842 Armed Occupation Act and built a beef business, and John T. Lesley, a cattleman and Confederate captain who formed the Sunny South Guards in 1860, later served in the state senate.

One of the most noted Oaklawn graves belongs to William Ashley, a Tampa City Clerk, and Nancy Ashley, the African American woman who was his longtime companion. Following instructions William left to his executor, the Ashley grave was reopened to receive Nancy at her death, and a headstone was raised to commemorate their fidelity, according to the city. The tour describes the Ashley graves as by far the most celebrated and one of the most curious interments at Oaklawn.

The city tour identifies two mass graves, both in the Northeast Section of Oaklawn. The first, beside the Sexton Cottage, holds the remains of 102 settlers and soldiers first buried at Fort Brooke, the U.S. Army post near the mouth of the Hillsborough River that was the first European settlement in the area. Fort Brooke was founded in 1824 and abandoned as a military post in 1832, by which time the settlement of Tampa had taken root.

The second Oaklawn mass grave holds an undetermined number of victims of yellow fever, known across the South as yellow jack. The city records five outbreaks in Tampa between 1850 and 1905, the worst in 1887 and 1888, when residents buried the dead together in haste. Wall, who had lost his wife and infant daughter to the fever after arriving in Tampa, argued that a mosquito carried it; the city notes that the idea was widely disbelieved at the time.

The small building near the Fort Brooke grave has its own date. The Sexton House, first called the Pavilion or Gazebo, was built in 1910 to store tools and equipment for the Oaklawn caretakers. The word sexton comes from the Latin sacristanus, a keeper of sacred objects.

Several Oaklawn grave forms are commonly misread. The city explains that square or domed vaults, which look like above-ground burials, cover interments that are below ground; the raised monument counters the sinking of graves in soft Florida soil. Cradle graves, the crib-like stone or masonry frames on many Tampa plots, held seasonal flower beds and did not mark only children. Decorative enclosures of ironwork, stone or masonry surround single graves or, more often, whole family plots, and some memorial plantings of cedar, oak, ivy and myrtle survive at Oaklawn today.

The carved symbols follow nineteenth century custom. The grave art stop lists the broken column for a life cut off, recumbent lambs on children's graves, the draped urn, the sheaf of wheat for a fruitful life, the rose on women's graves, the weeping willow, ivy for fidelity, and fraternal emblems of Freemasonry, Woodmen of the World, the Elks and the American Legion. The City of Tampa asks walkers on the Harrison Street grounds not to touch markers, make rubbings or step inside plot enclosures.

General care of Oaklawn rests with the City of Tampa Parks and Recreation Department, which removes faded or noncompliant decorations under the city cemetery rules and the Chapter 8 ordinance. The city schedules AmeriCorps Green Team clean-ups every other Tuesday morning, rotating through the city-owned cemeteries, and holds additional clean-ups with Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful and The Cemetery Society. Families with a veteran buried at Oaklawn or another city cemetery can obtain a Veteran headstone through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, though the city does not install the stones itself.