Bones lead to mystery Miami graveyard from 1900s

times picayune ^ | 7/16/2009 | TAMARA LUSH

[BBell]

(AP) — MIAMI - When Enid Pinkney was a girl in the 1940s, her grandmother would tell her stories about a black cemetery nestled in the northwest corner of Miami in an area once called Lemon City.

Pinkney never saw any headstones or tombs on the former farm land, which gradually became surrounded by small homes, car lots and industrial warehouses starting in the 1950s and 1960s. Interstate 95 rumbles past a few blocks away.

But Pinkney's grandmother was apparently right. The bones of at least 11 people-and possibly dozens more-were recently discovered during construction of an affordable housing project. A local historian says the site was probably a cemetery for settlers from the Bahamas who came to South Florida in the early 1900s to tend to wealthy whites and to help build Florida's most cosmopolitan city.

Now Pinkney, a 78-year-old activist and civic historian, is among those who want construction halted and the site designated as historic.

"Even though the people are dead, they are speaking to us," said Pinkney, who went before the city's Historic Preservation Board last week to discuss the discovery. "Their spirits are saying, we were here. We laid the foundation for this community and we are being disrespected."

The scattered bones were first discovered in April. Someone called Pinkney about the find and she started to ask around in the black community to see what people remembered.

Pinkney approached Teresita DeVeaux, a 100-year-old woman who was born in the Bahamas and came to Miami as a child. DeVeaux remembered that a young man named Theophilus Clark was buried there. Pinkney mentioned this detail to a reporter from The Miami Herald-and when a story with Clark's name was published, a local historian named Larry Wiggins took note.

Wiggins said he plugged Clark's name into a

[BBell]

A neat storie. It's interesting that a local historian used the Mormon genealogy Web site to solve the mystery.

[BBell]

not ancient history but a neat storie.

[Lockbar]

[VeniVidiVici]

I know the Mormons are good with genealogy but how did they know the guy was buried in a cemetery that didn’t exist? Pretty cool.

[Psalm 73]

"Even though the people are dead, they are speaking to us,"

If they tell you to do bad things, ignore them.

[TC Rider]

Affordable housing supplants affordable cemetary.

[SunkenCiv]

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