Posted on 11/21/2019 8:01:56 AM PST by BenLurkin
The Hillsborough County school district said Wednesday that geophysical technicians found “clear evidence” of burials at the Clarence Leon King High School campus.
School officials believe the caskets are part of Ridgewood Cemetery, a historic paupers’ burial ground from the early 1940s that was owned by the city, according to the Florida Genealogical Society. King High School opened in 1960, according to the school’s website.
Tanya Arja, a spokeswoman with the school district, said officials began investigating last month after a person told a school board member of the possible location of the cemetery.
For nearly two weeks, technicians hired by the district used ground penetrating radar to confirm the location of the caskets. The coffins are buried 3-5 feet deep in about an acre of open land, and near a small building used by school’s agricultural program, the district said.
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
The 1940s were 80 years ago. The adults of that era who may have known about this, are all dead. Even the youngsters back then would have started dying off of old age by now, as well.
Documentation? Paperwork? Newspaper accounts? All buried in time or in boxes in the basement or at the back of old storage files somewhere
I mean, I run into young folks all the time who don't have a clue what happened 10 years ago, let alone 80+ years ago.
Things don't get passed on. Things get forgotten. Eventually, one day, no one knows anything about a graveyard under the school yard.
Not hard to see how this could happen or existed and no one alive today would know anything about it.
“geophysical technicians”
Haven’t heard of that one before.
Also mention paupers. Neither AAs or paupers got much of a marker and definitely not headstones. Might have gotten a small concrete or steel/iron marker with a number on it
But the school was opened in 1960. "In the 1940's" could be anywhere from 1940 to 1949. The school must have started construction before it opened.
That means less than 20, and as little as 10 years between the time it was a cemetery and when the area was planned to be a schoolyard.
Smells like a government worker “solution” to me.
BEAT ME TO IT! Goes back to Cummins Prison farm, Arkansas.
A man I worked with said he found an old slave cemetery on their farm they had bought. No markers but bones only.
Near where I live, a construction company got in trouble back in the early 90s. They were building a big condo complex in an area that was a giant potter’s field used to bury Spanish Flu victims back in the 1910s. Nothing was marked, and I guess they didn’t bother to do any research before they bought the land, so they made no attempt to find the graves or anything. The workers just started pulling up bones with the backhoes when they were getting ready to lay the foundations. This was the primary mass grave area for the whole north side of Chicago too, so we’re talking a LOT of bones.
Well, the workers called the boss, and the boss said “just throw the bones in the dumpster”. Somebody dropped the dime on him pretty quick and he had to pay tons of fines and the work stopped for about 3 years while they had to clear out the whole site.
Do you know how he traced it back to being a "slave graveyard," as opposed to a small community one? I'm sure such information can be found with proper investigation.
Perfect
Ask the night custodians if they had any experiences with strange happenings, during their *graveyard shift*.
Future voters?
I can still see the school being built and no evidence of the graves ever being revealed. Especially if there were no headstones. Grass grown over the grave sites.
I live in rural Florida now and I have seen things disappear over ten years on my own farm that the sandy soil just "absorbed" over time.
It's still not a stretch to see how this could have happened.
All Democrats
No coffins, just buried bones, shallow. Plowing pulled them up.
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