For more than 100 years, three cemeteries in West Coconut Grove have been the final resting place for the men and women prominent in building and leading what had long been one of South Florida’s most vibrant Black communities.
Among those buried in above-ground crypts are many of the city’s original Bahamian settlers, including Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup, a real estate developer, and his wife Charlotte Jane Stirrup, for whom one of the burial grounds is named.
But also interred beneath the live oaks and gumbo limbo trees are hundreds of West Grove residents whose names and legacies lie buried in unrecorded graves that are unmarked, painted over or so weathered by time that inscriptions have been worn away…