Few people traveling along busy Edgewater Drive in Orlando’s College Park neighborhood are aware there used to be a cemetery across from the modern Incarnation Catholic Church.
It was established in 1906, after the death of Irish immigrant Nicholas Mernaugh. Having outlived his wife and all their children, he bequeathed his entire estate to the Catholic church with some stipulations: that the church must establish and consecrate a cemetery for the faithful, that he should be laid to rest in that cemetery, and that the remains of his loved ones be transferred there from the city’s Greenwood Cemetery.
The church was more than happy to agree to these conditions, because the Mernaugh estate was quite large and included the valuable site of the family’s old grocery store on the west side of Orange Avenue in downtown Orlando. A spot was identified in “Tucker’s Woods” along what was then known as the Apopka Road – now Edgewater Drive – and land was consecrated in the name of St. Mary…