Every city has cemeteries. It’s a natural part of life, and the end of it.
People go there to visit lost loved ones and reflect, and you’ve probably seen the well-manicured grounds, rows of granite headstones, and elaborate tributes to friends and family.
(Michael Hinman/Staff Photo)
There are many cemeteries like that in the area. The Mount Carmel Cemetery isn’t one of them.
The African-American cemetery, located off Ehren Cutoff, is a throwback to a different time — a time of segregation, and later, a time of neglect. It’s in better shape now, thanks to the Pasco County Black Caucus, but it’s clear that this is not a modern burial site. If you drove past it, you’d probably never know what it was.
First, a little history.
The community of Ehren — yep, that’s where the road’s name comes from — was a sawmill town in the late 1800s. There were white mill workers and African-American mill workers. They had separate living areas, separate churches, and separate cemeteries.
The Mount Carmel African Methodist Episcopal Church was one that served the African-American community, and they had their own cemetery. So workers and their families would attend the church and were eventually laid to rest there.
In 1920, a fire destroyed the sawmill. Back then, that usually meant the community was destroyed with it. The church eventually closed, but many African-Americans stayed and worked at nearby mills or companies.
They had the Oak Grove Baptist Church to serve their spiritual needs, but the old A.M.E. cemetery was still used as a burial site.
The Oak Grove Baptist Church itself closed a couple decades later, and the last person was buried at the Mount Carmel cemetery in the mid-1950s. And by the looks of things, that was the last anyone thought of the cemetery for several years. It wasn’t maintained, cows from a nearby pasture would trample the headstones, and fallen trees would just lie there rotting.
It wasn’t a cemetery the way you’d think of one today. It was a forgotten piece of land that was supposed to be a place where loved ones wouldn’t be forgotten.
That was basically how things stood until 2006, when a cleanup and preservation project finally got underway.
Think about that: A decade ago, it was still ignored and overrun. It took more than a half-century after the last burial for somebody to finally get around to maintaining it.
During the cleanup work, the county found broken headstones and other debris littering the ground. But they got it cleaned up, documented what remained, and even did radar tests to confirm that there were more burials there than are marked currently.
Today there are supposed to be seven headstones in the cemetery — it’s locked so I couldn’t go inside to verify — but dozens more are laid to rest there. Exactly who they all are, nobody can say. We don’t even know how long they’ve been there.
Some documentation suggests there were graves decades before the sawmill came into existence, meaning the use of the land as a cemetery predates the town proper. But most headstones were made of wood, and have since decayed away.
The few stone headstones that do exist stick up from the ground like broken teeth, and many of those only hint at who lies at rest there. Some have names but no legible dates. One has a name with a single date, so we don’t know if that’s the date of birth or death.
Another is an infant from the Horton family. And there are many more beneath the earth. They all have stories; we just don’t know what they are.
Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those “go see this place” stories. The gates are locked. Barbed wire designates the cemetery’s boundaries, and there’s nowhere to park but the open field by the side of the road.
If you were to walk up to it and didn’t read the signage, you’d have no idea it was a cemetery. There are no benches and no pathways. I think in the very back you can see one of the headstones, but driving by in your car it would just be a blur of trees and grass.
It’s more than that, of course. It’s the final resting place of hard-working people who lived during a difficult time, kept their faith, and were buried close to where they lived. And it’s good that the cemetery is finally cleaned up, designated and protected.
But you get the feeling that those laid to rest there deserved better over the years. The decades weren’t kind to the Mount Carmel Cemetery, and the situation only improved a few years ago.
The word “Ehren” is of German origin, and it means “to honor.” But when it comes to the deceased buried at the cemetery, it took decades to begin to live up to that word.
Published August 13, 2014
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