JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A Jacksonville park and community center may be sitting on top of as many as 600 unmarked graves, and there is no proof the bodies were ever moved before the land was developed. Now, state funding is on the way to find them.
The land in Durkeeville was once Mount Herman Cemetery — Jacksonville’s first large cemetery for the Black community following emancipation, established in the 1880s. The people buried there included families, soldiers from LaVilla, and the formerly enslaved.
From cemetery to community center
Use of Mount Herman Cemetery began to decline in the early 1900s, when the cemetery district for African Americans moved to Moncrief. The Mayor of LaVilla, Francis LeEngle, originally established the cemetery. A private owner — likely one of his descendants — later sold the land to the city. As Interstate 95 was being built nearby through Sugar Hill and Wilder Park, the city needed additional park space and chose the Mount Herman Cemetery land. Emmett Reed Community Center was built on the site in the 1960s.
The cemetery has been a park for roughly 50 years. Community members who grew up in the area remember it well.
The number keeps growing
Ennis Davis, an urban planner and co-founder of Community Planning Collaborative, is part of the research team hired to work with the city on honoring the cemetery alongside other revitalization projects in Durkeeville, a historically Black community.
Davis said the scope of the burial site has grown significantly as research has continued.
“The names, that you referenced, over about a two to three year period, we’ve got resources that we can start to check every year,” Davis said. “This has grown from the 100 and something to about 600 and counting.”
Initial documents indicated that between 100 and 200 bodies were buried on the land. That number has since grown to approximately 600 — and researchers say the count is ongoing. Among the known burials: American soldiers, their loved ones, and at least one man whose gravesite sits beneath a sidewalk. A family plot — the Fagin family — sits just behind the tree line on the property, predating any development.
A 1887 map from the State Library and Archives of Florida confirms the cemetery’s footprint before Durkeeville existed as a neighborhood.
Radar survey will search for the deceased
The Florida state budget for 2026–27 includes funding through the Abandoned African American Cemetery Grant program, and the city of Jacksonville is among those set to benefit.
“We were able to work with the parks department last year to write a grant — the African American cemeteries grant — to fund ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, to confirm where potential burials may be, but also to construct some memorial signage to tell that story and honor the past,” Davis said.
Ground-penetrating radar works by detecting voids in the ground, which can indicate the likely location of buried remains. Funding is expected to arrive this fall. A consultant will survey the land, and the work must be completed by 2027.
Honoring both the past and the present
The city says it plans to honor the dual memory of the site — recognizing the people buried there first, while also preserving the fond memories generations of Jacksonville residents have made at the park and community center that stands there today.