The Key West Cemetery by Barbara Ross

LUCY BURDETTE: I should be traveling home today and hopefully I am, but I asked my pal Barbara Ross if I could share her wonderful post about the Key West cemetery for your reading pleasure. You'll remember her as the author of the delightful Maine Clambake mystery series, but she also shares my love for Key West. Welcome back Barb!

BARBARA ROSS: The cemetery in Key West is a spot most tourists visit. It’s best known for its above-ground graves, like in New Orleans, and the light-hearted epitaphs of some its inhabitants, including the tombstones that say, “I told you I was sick,” “I’m just resting my eyes,” “If you’re reading this, you desperately need a hobby,” “I always wanted a little plot of land in Key West,” and “Devoted fan of singer Julio Iglesais.”

The cemetery was founded in 1847, after the previous burial grounds were washed away in a hurricane, though some of the graves, brought there from the earlier cemeteries, are older. Containing approximately 100,000 graves, more than three times the living population of Key West, the still-active cemetery is the only game in town, the final resting place for people of all religions, races, occupations and classes.

In addition to the regular walking tours, three times a year, the Historic Florida Keys Foundation offers a “Cemetery Stroll,” as a fundraiser. Living interpreters, often with a connection to the dead, tell the stories of some of the people buried there. Bill and I took one of those tours in March. There are so many interesting people buried in the cemetery, you can take these tours multiple times.

Here are just a few of the fascinating people whose stories we heard on our tour..

Sandy Cornish



Sandy Cornish was born a slave in 1793. In 1839, he was able to buy his freedom for $3000. His emancipation papers were burned in a fire that swept through the wooden buildings of the city of Port Leon in the Florida panhandle where he lived and worked. Unable to prove his status as a free man, when slave traders tried to take him to the market in New Orleans, he gathered a crowd in a square in Port Leon and publicly maimed himself, cutting his Achilles tendon, stabbing himself in the hip with a knife, and cutting off a finger. Worthless as a slave, he and his wife Lillah, whose freedom they had also purchased, moved to Key West. They founded a farm and orchard on the land where our rented house now stands and prospered, becoming one of the wealthiest couples in the city. Sandy Cornish founded the Cornish Chapel of the AME Methodist Church. The church houses a thriving congregation today.

The exact location of Sandy Cornish’s grave in the Key West Cemetery has been lost to history, so a memorial was recently erected. The story of Cornish’s life was told by well-known local singer Wilhelmina Lopez-Martin, who sang the intro and the outro.

William Curry



William Curry arrived in Key West penniless from Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas in 1837. He died as Florida’s first millionaire. He had many enterprises, but made the bulk of his fortune wrecking, salvaging goods from ships that wrecked in the treacherous waters of the Keys. This is how many early Key West fortunes were made. You can tour and even stay in The Curry Mansion, which is a Bed and Breakfast today.

On the Cemetery Stroll, William Curry’s story was told by Clinton Curry, a distant relative who still lives in Key West.

The Watlington Family Plot



Captain Francis Watlington and his wife Emeline raised their nine daughters in the house that is now the Oldest House Museum in Key West. Though Key West stayed with the Union in the Civil War, Captain Watlington joined the Confederate Navy. After the war, he lived principally in New York City, though he returned to Key West in his final years to be nursed by his youngest daughter, Lily, who had similarly cared for her mother and two of her sisters. She died in 1936. Earl Johnson was the last descendant to live in the house until his death in 1972, meaning the house was continuously lived in by one family for around a hundred and forty years.

The Watlington family’s story was told by Karl Reutling, a docent and historian at the Oldest House.

The Adderlys



George and Olivia Adderly immigrated separately from the Bahamas in 1890 and married soon after. They purchased land on Vaca Key which is now part of the City of Marathon. They built their home out of tabby, a kind of concrete made by burning shells to extract the lime. Incredibly the home still stands today, despite hurricanes and the punishing tropical climate, and you can tour it. The Adderlys attracted a Bahamanian community around them that thrived on sponge-fishing. When Henry Flagler built his railroad to Key West and needed a right of way over the Adderly land, George Adderly, a literate, but otherwise unadvantaged black man, went toe-to-toe with the richest and most powerful man in Florida, and demanded a station stop at Vaca Key in return. Flagler acquiesced. The stop meant the men of the little settlement could more easily move their sponges to market in Key West, while the women made money selling garden produce and baked goods to rail workers and travelers at the stop.

The Adderly’s stories were told by Key West City Commissioner Clayton Lopez and Phyllis LeConte.

Rosa and Mary Navarro



One of the most photographed graves in the Key West Cemetery are the mother and child angels at the graves of Mary and Rosa Navarro, which have recently been beautifully restored. The inscription on Mary Navarro’s statue says, “To the sacred memory of a brokenhearted mother.” The Navarros made their money in cigar-making and at the turn of the twentieth century, their interests took them to Manhattan. Rosa Navarro died in a fall from their apartment window when she was nine. Though her mother lived four years longer, she never recovered, following her daughter in death in 1907.

The Navarro’s story was told by Ron Wampler, and Diane Silvia, Executive Director of the Historic Florida Keys Foundation which is responsible for the restoration.

The stories in the Key West Cemetery, of fortunes made and lost in wrecking, farming, sponging, and cigar-making, of lives of triumph and tragedy, are the stories of the history of Key West. Even the tongue-in-cheek inscriptions I quoted at the top are a part of the irreverent atmosphere of the island. I’ve included just a few of the fascinating lives we learned about on the tour.

Readers: Do you ever walk in or visit cemeteries? What have you seen and learned?

[All photos in this post are by Bill Carito. If you like them and want to see more, you can friend him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bcarito and follow him on Instagram at billcarito and bill.carito.colorphotos.]

A Tour of the Key West Cemetery by Jane Newhagen

LUCY BURDETTE: when you get to know someone in Key West, you often find you have multiple connections. And this is true for our guest today, who introduced me to my wonderful tarot reading character, Lorenzo AKA Ron, fished me into writing the newsletter for the Key West Friends of the Library, belongs as I do to the Key West Writers Guild, and answers my questions about the Key West cemetery. (And if you visit Key West, make sure you put the cemetery on your bucket list.) With Halloween coming, I thought you would love to meet Jane and get a taste of her cemetery tour! Welcome Jane!

JANE NEWHAGEN: I’m a taphophile—a person who is fascinated by cemeteries, funerals, gravestones and the like. We’re not a morbid bunch, rather we’re interested in the stories that lie behind the monuments and the individuals who lie beneath the ground.

It won’t surprise you, then, when I tell you that for fourteen years I was the Archivist at the Key West City Cemetery. I was responsible for patching together information about the graves there dating from 1847 when the cemetery was founded. Five years ago, I started the Cemetery Strolls. Held on three Saturdays during the winter season, the strolls are guided tours to significant gravesites where volunteers tell the stories of those who are buried there.

One reason I enjoyed being Archivist was because of a special plot that led to my writing three historical novels, Sand Dollar, Pieces of Eight, and Chambered Nautilus. It’s not coincidental that the first one, Sand Dollar, starts out just before the great hurricane of 1846 when the original cemetery was blown away with bodies in the trees and gravestones coming to rest halfway across the island. All three novels are based on the lives of the permanent residents of Lot 49 on 4th Avenue in the cemetery.

Yes, the cemetery streets are named just like city streets. There are eight numbered avenues and Palm Avenue. They’re crossed by Clara, Magnolia, Violet, Laurel, and Higgs Streets. The Catholic section is in the north corner and the Jewish cemetery in the east corner, but you’ll find people of all faiths and ethnicities buried side-by-side throughout the cemetery.

The gravestone most tourists want to see belongs to Pearl Roberts. Pearl’s frequent complaints of ill health led to her being written off as a hypochondriac, but Pearl was right. She died in 1979 at only 50 years of age and her memorial marker on the family mausoleum reads, “I Told You I Was Sick.” Gloria Russell’s memorial is there, too. It says, “I’m just resting my eyes.” I often say that myself, and I think of Gloria whenever I do.

Thomas Romer (1783-1891) is buried on Fourth Avenue. He was an African-Bahamian who served in the War of 1812 as a privateer. His headstone attests to his 108-year life and his standing as a “good citizen” for sixty-five years. We choose to believe that the reference is to the fact that he became a naturalized American citizen at the age of forty-three, not that he was a good citizen for sixty-five years and not so good for the rest of his life.

William Curry’s monument is the most imposing one in the cemetery. Curry (1824-1896) was a very successful businessman and became Florida’s first millionaire. His descendants live here today. Some years ago the big urn on top of the monument was pushed over by an encroaching tree. It took scaffolding and a crane to restore it to its rightful place. As you can imagine conservation and restoration of these old monuments is an ongoing job. It’s expensive, too. The Historic Florida Keys Foundation manages conservation and restoration and relies on grants and contributions from the Cemetery Strolls for funding.

Some of the statues are more expressive than others. The face of the lovely angel memorializing Mary Navarro appears to weep when climactic conditions are right. Her family was visiting New York City in 1901 and she warned her daughter Rosa not to go near the window. Rosa did and fell to her death. Mary died of a broken heart not long after. The monument shows the mother angel admonishing the child angel to behave.


Sadly, we don’t know who is buried in some of our graves. Maybe the markers were wood and deteriorated over time. Maybe the cemetery sexton was illiterate or didn’t have a sense of the importance of his records. Most of the early graves were in family lots and at the time “everybody knew” where the Curry or Lowe or Roberts lot was, so that’s what is written on the burial card. Today there are dozens of lots with those names and, without more information, it’s anybody’s guess where those individuals are located.

You can see my enthusiasm for the history of Key West and its people. It was my great pleasure to research and write my three historical novels: Sand Dollar, Pieces of Eight, and Chambered Nautilus. They’re tales of old Key West and firmly grounded in historical facts. In fact, I followed the pattern of the earliest family members as seen in their cemetery plot and fictionalized their stories. They’re available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. I hope you’ll take a look.

I also had the privilege of writing the text for After Life ~ Images from the Key West Cemetery. It’s a visual presentation of the cemetery with photographs by Carol Tedesco and Roberta DiPiero. It’s also available from Amazon.

Are you a lover of cemeteries? Do you have a particular favorite?

Jane Newhagen was born and raised in Denver, Colorado and graduated from Brown University. She’s lived up and down the east coast and Paris, France and came to Key West in 2000. Jane received the Richard Heyman Recognition Award from the Anne McKee Artists Fund of the Florida Keys for Pieces of Eight and again for the third novel in the series, Chambered Nautilus.

Jane recently retired from working at the Key West City Cemetery after fourteen years as Archivist. There she organized and digitalized burial records. In her spare time she volunteers for Take Stock in Children, a scholarship program for gifted, needy students. She enjoys classical music, traveling, and is a voracious reader.